A filmmaker who can open his movie like gangbusters – literally like, Gangbusters, the old radio show whose opening machine-gun trill spawned the expression – has, if we can mix metaphors and weapons, unsheathed a double-edged sword. Take Crimson Gold (Talaye sorkh), the newest feature from 39-year-old Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.
A camera planted somewhere in the back of a dark shop watches in an unbroken, long take as a husky-looking robber lounges through a jewelry heist that is going slowly, crazily, self-destructively awry. As his frantic partner outside in the street pleads with him to grab the loot and run, the man inside, with what is clearly deranged dispassion, murders the off-screen shopkeeper and then, all of a sudden, shoots himself in the head. The combination of stylistic and dramatic daring combine in Panahi’s gambit of planting the camera, not on a tripod, but in human hands, so that it makes slight movements to follow the action. This is the action of a filmmaker who scorns the opposition of objective and subjective, but instead affirms a sympathy that equates the camera with the bobbing, turning, twisting head of the supremely concerned, but helpless, observer.
But, heavens, how do you follow that?
The level of political oppression in a country can often be gauged by the interpretive possibilities offered by its movies. This has been especially the case with Iran, whose recent “golden age” in the 1990s was largely made up of films ostensibly made for the edification of children and adolescents, but which, subtextually, offered complex depictions of social turmoil.
Jafar Panahi’s 1995 feature, The White Balloon (Badkonake sefid) (which was written by Abbas Kiarostami, perhaps the leading figure of Iranian cinema), fit this prescription to a T. As a girl and her brother attempt to buy a goldfish with which to properly celebrate the New Year, they encounter an assortment of characters whose backgrounds, circumstances and plights provide a deep, but oblique context for their adventure.
As reformers achieved some political power in Iran, Panahi was able to make The Circle (Dayereh) in 2000, which cast aside any pretense to be anything but an expose of female oppression under the rule of the mullahs and blind tradition. Panahi framed the action as a multi-story melodrama, but the social issues and, more to the point, Panahi’s harsh condemnation of them, dominated the film.
Crimson Gold (also written by Kiarostami), like The Circle, reflects its production origins under a regime of political reform. Once again, the filmmaker makes light use of a genre format (the crime film), as an organizing device for a fierce attack on Iranian social organization. And once again, Panahi’s attitude is visceral, the film’s animating spirit threatening to tear down its flimsy structure from moment to moment.
This brings us back to the apparently nihilistic opening, the challenge of meeting its excitement, and the general problem of structure.
Panahi – and presumably Kiarostami – simply employ a flashback, a hoary device that risks reducing characters to players in a scheme (that is, everything we are going to see is important only in that it leads up to that moment we saw at the opening). But just as Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel were able to overcome that implicit limitation in their versions of The Killers, so Panahi eliminates the threat with virtually his first flashback scene.
Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin), the big man, and Ali (Kamyar Sheissi), the man out in the street), have quasi-innocently come into possession of a rich woman’s purse. Inside is a broken wedding ring but, more tempting, a receipt for an expensive piece of jewelry. In plot terms, the receipt is important because it’s what leads the two men to the jewelry store for the first time. Once there, they suffer the first of two humiliations at the hands of the store owner, who pegs them (correctly) as working class and tries to pack them off to the bazaar gold merchants. A second visit, with the woman who is both Hussein’s fiancée and Ali’s sister, produces an even more mortifying encounter, the owner’s patronizing attitude scarcely concealing class contempt.
This is all important. But the scene where Hussein and Ali open the purse and examine the contents is important – and fascinating – in and of itself. They ride their motorcycles to a café, order cheap coffees, and talk in that peculiar sort of round-about intimacy that marks some friendships. It becomes clear soon enough that Hussein’s bulk isn’t the sort born of robust eating or drinking; he couldn’t afford the cost of such intake any case. He’s puffy rather than fat. Combined with his subdued, almost affectless demeanor, and his measured speech, it’s an indication that Hussein is medicated, maybe with anti-psychotics but at least with heavy doses of anti-depressants.
Ali and Hussein are joined by a third man, a stranger, who soon reveals a knowledge in the ways of petty crime and the three have an circuitous conversation whose exact meaning isn’t entirely clear, but whose conclusion is relatively clear: There is neither exact good nor exact evil in Hussein and Ali’s world, yet moral choices are foisted on them frequently.
Panahi’s camerawork throughout this sequence is unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable. A member of a privileged class himself, he doesn’t presume to “identify” with Ali or Hussein. He allows them to possess their space, but not so much that they exist within the distant and distancing arc of irony or dramatic anthropology. While he does this, Panahi remains alert to the points of narrative that the action will follow.
The flashback episodes to come are busier than this opening glimpse, but they manage to find moments of stillness to communicate their fullest messages. Hussein and Ali turn out to be pizza deliverymen, riding their motorcycles around Tehran to the homes of the wealthy (there appears to be no middle-class, only working-class and the rich and very rich).
Hussein quickly establishes himself as the main character and its his encounters with his customers, as well as his dismaying experiences in the jewelry store, that form our understanding of the film’s opening – which will also be its climax. But, as the café scene suggests, the film’s progress is not as reductive as that. The most extended portion occurs when Hussein tries to make a delivery to an apartment house only to be stopped by the police, who have set up a small cordon outside. They’re waiting for young people to come out of another flat in the building, where they’ve been dancing and drinking, violations of the law which will land them in serious trouble. Hussein just wants to deliver his pizza and go, but he’s detained out of an officer’s arrogance, and so he waits with parents (one of whom is the snitch) and a young soldier. Hussein has no words of wisdom to offer, or not many. Mostly he’s a mute witness, a living contrast to the convolutions of injustice that twirl around him.
In Hussein, Crimson Gold discovers the monkey wrench in the machinery, the inconveniently human being which keeps processes – capitalist, religious fundamentalist – from lying successfully. Unfortunately, as we know right from the start, these processes are able to steamroll individual victims and pervert the courses of their anger well enough.
Panahi himself is falling victim to these processes, although with less severe consequences. Crimson Gold has never been shown in Iran and, now that the religious fundamentalists are reasserting themselves over the reformists, it’s unlikely that it will be shown in the near or medium term. In return, the West insults him for being Iranian; he’s been denied a visa to enter the U.S.
So Crimson Gold is a measure of a country’s repressive condition. Iran opened enough politically for Panahi to show us its delicate condition openly and harshly, and the plight of its most vulnerable citizens openly and gently. Let’s hope that if Panahi continues to work in Iran, that his next work won’t be a children’s film.