TIFF '24: A Mohammad Rasoulof Double Feature

by Cláudio Alves

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

Much of the period leading up to this year's Cannes Film Festival was consumed with news of Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. Always outspoken against an oppressive regime, his career has been dedicated to political art commenting on present injustices through the prism of fiction. For this, he has been arrested multiple times, and his latest feature, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, proved too much for the Iranian authorities. Police hounded many people involved with the production, Cannes organizers were pressured to drop the official competition title, and Rasoulof himself was put behind bars, convicted to eight years in prison and an additional filmmaking ban. Thankfully, before celebrations started at the Croisette, the cineaste managed an escape to a safe house in Germany, the same country that now takes Sacred Fig to the Oscars as its official submission.

At TIFF, two works with screenplays signed by the Iranian political dissident were screened. There was the eponymous Cannes prize-winner and Seven Days, directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi…

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG, Mohammad Rasoulof

For twenty years, Iman has dedicated his life to maintaining the status quo, upholding the rule of Iran's theocratic regime as one of many shadowy figures working behind the scenes, often in secret. At long last, his faithful labor has borne fruit and a promotion is upon him. Now a judge with added responsibilities and a gun to take home for personal protection, the patriarch feels ready to share the truth of his profession with the two nearly adult daughters who've spent their entire lives in blissful ignorance. So starts Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a slow-boiling trap of a film whose story begins in perilous middle-class mundanity and ends falling into the pits of chaos.

Nevertheless, the writer-director doesn't take the expected route to get there. If you're familiar with Rasoulof's work, such a statement may sound dubious. After all, though exquisitely furious, the director's films tend to present a premise and develop it according to all the well-oiled, tried and true precepts of arthouse festival cinema. There's a tragic dimension to them, the sense that once something starts, a fated conclusion is inevitable and all struggle against it a painful futility. It's a domino chain passing itself as narrative form, and it can make the experience of Rasoulof's creations into a tiresome trudge toward a too-obvious destination. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an escalation that goes according to plan but contracts and transforms on the way there, traipsing over the solemnity of political drama to flirt with genre pulp, perchance even a kiss of absurdity near the finish line. The first sign of volatility comes with Rasoulof's multimedia experiment, mixing footage from the real-life 2022 protests in Tehran with the fictional realities of Iman's family home. These intrusions come from the TV and from the girl's phones, with Rezvan and Sana revealing themselves much more progressive than their parents might like. If nothing else, though shaped by their class, they have open eyes, unblinkered by the regime's poisonous promises and their parents' talk of duty.

Watching the first hour of The Seed of the Sacred Fig is like looking over a powder keg, knowing a spark is bound to set it off, but unaware of when the fire will come. Interludes of ritual domesticity are opportunities to breathe, perchance to cry, presenting the act of care – for a husband, for a fugitive – as an oasis of trance-like calm in the middle of a desert, sand tainted red by public bloodshed. Amid these tensions, the matriarch Najmeh emerges as the most fascinating contradiction, one who can see yet chooses to look away. Activist Soheila Golestani embodies her with precise authenticity, a scalpel's sharp slash, ready to cut and dissect a state of affairs where some women are driven to defend a system that goes against their own interests.

Up to a point, of course. One day, the gun disappears, and Iman won't accept that he might have lost it, that it might be his fault in some way. No, one of the women took it. They must have. His certainty is the spark, and once the ignition manifests, it all goes up in flames. Then, even Najmeh's patriarchal pressures upon her daughters are put to the test. In a magisterial directorial twist, Rasoulof breaks a cinematic language of patient stately static shots one hour and twenty minutes into a 168-minute epic, indulging in the formalist fractiousness of a mad mobile long take. That's far from the only instance when the film's protracted structure sets the stage for tour de force filmmaking. 

Consider the blindfolded interrogation of a mother and her daughters, a game of silent humiliation where guilt is an assumed truth and every denial seen as a sure lie. See the car chase through the desert, or the repeated confessions to a camera that watches all, impassive as a man shows himself to be small and cruel, infantile, monstrous. Oh, and the sound, what a perfect soundscape this film has. In the end, if there's one thing The Seed of the Sacred Fig proves, it is that, though Rasoulof is often praised for the stories he chooses to tell, his directorial chops are on another level altogether. Inelegance is par of the course with his pamphleteer screenwriting, yet Rasoulof is an agile thriller filmmaker, as bold as he is refined, willing to take risks within a classicist framework. Most of the time, in Sacred Fig, those risky maneuvers pay off tenfold.

SEVEN DAYS, Ali Samadi Ahadi

Inspired by the life of Iranian activist and Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, Seven Days mulls over the balance between one's duties to the resistance and the personal cost of such political action. As the title implies, the narrative has a limited temporal scope, going over a week of medical leave in the sentence of Maryam, a standard-bearer in the fight against the regime whose exploits have landed her behind bars. Her face is known everywhere, her voice a call to arms. At the start of Seven Days, she's just had a heart attack, prompting her release to get treatment that goes beyond the capabilities of the current carceral system. 

Unbeknownst to the authorities, she's also going to her expatriated family, set on a journey beyond borders to see the children who barely know her and the dutiful husband who struggles to keep her memory alive in absentia. It's no easy feat, for the hearts of teenagers are selfish things, unable to tolerate the pain of exile and a mother's non-presence. Rasoulof and Ahadi are keen on showing these schisms within the family unit, long before their reunion with Mariyam pours lemon juice on open wounds, mixing relief with new libation of pain. An odd structural gambit, it doesn't always function to the narrative's benefit, diluting the protagonist's emotional and geographic journey.

Then again, a glaring issue within the film's shape lies in the audience's knowledge of Mariyam's inner workings. Often kept at a distance, it can become challenging for the viewer to follow her thought processes. Long-gestating decisions come off as rude shocks, tasting more of dramatic betrayal than a woman's will. Important topics abound, and their discussion is appropriately prickly, but does Seven Days do enough? The visual language adds entry points into Mariyam's interiority and erects new obstacles, too. Ahadi's camera can regularly be found slightly above the actors, looking down, an invisible force pinning them in place and wavering, switching gravity, a predator preparing to pounce if its prey tries to run for its life.

Such camerawork has an inquisitive, hostile personality. It's never anonymous or depersonalized. If anything, it conveys a sense of voyeurism, making the audience an intruder into intimate settings. Even in static composition, there's the instability of handheld, a buzz of restlessness that exteriorizes Mariyam's surface anxieties. Sadly, it also flattens them, squashing the possibility for more granular readings. This wouldn't be such a problem with a less blunt text or a soundscape less keen on emphatic strings to underline every tension point. A car ride with an old friend is a good example, oscillating between beautiful character detail and the crushing need to say something at all times, with the heart-wrenching musical score to match.

As with much of Rasoulof's work as a writer, the dialogue is heavy-handed to a fault, brimming with righteous anger but unwilling to articulate it through unique character voices. At least, there's a justification here, a couching of the self-important dialogue in these figures' circumstances and vocations as activist leaders, smugglers, and political agents. The actors do what they can, but they're often backed into corners, asked to perform complex characterizations without a textual foundation beneath them. As Mariyam, Vishka Asayesh is the most affected, though she's equally blessed with moments that transcend Seven Days' fragilities and grasp a greater majesty.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Seven Days played in TIFF's Centerpiece section. The former will be distributed by NEON later this year, just in time for major awards consideration.