Iran, 2007
Directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani
With Mahtab Keramati (Nardaneh), Pegah Ahangarani (the maidservant), Mehdi Ahmadi (Bahram), Farrokh Nemati (Haftvad), Ahoo Kheradmand (Haftvad’s wife), Ezzatolah Entezami (the judge)
As the camera glides over a stately white facade featuring sculptures while the film’s titles roll, the voices the soundtrack plays relate a bizarre trial, with a woman pleading a judge to punish her husband after he broke a mirror, bringing bad luck to their home and life, while the husband blames her for the futility of the charge and her bad faith. The judge, unsurprisingly, dismisses the case, his move bringing at last the camera inside the courtroom and suggesting the film could be a courtroom drama may be in the making. But other mirrors, as it happens, would play a part in the film: the object has not been a talking point for nothing, not even for entertaining the audience, it is signaling from the start the weight of fate and tragedy.
A court’s clerk calls out a name, the next plaintiff the judge is to hear in this ordinary working day in the Islamic Republic of Iran in the early 21st century. But the man startling as he hears out of the blue his name, Haftvad, is driving a car in a distant place and, it appears soon, in another time. This is not a fresh take on the modern Iran and its discontent, after all: once again voice is cheating on our expectations and denying any link with the images, which remain splendid and bring now the audience in the gorgeously arid and rocky landscape of the Kerman region. This is about, it seems, a man, his wife, and their grown-up daughter going to a ceremony. But the older woman is thirsty: so the hubby pulls out his car near a fortress, hoping to get water as he is oddly convinced that the antiquated ruins are still inhabited. To his dismay, he cannot find a door that could be opened but his daughter, Nardaneh, manages to sneak inside. The parents think she has vanished and cry for her, never imagining she willfully walked inside the fortress – and would stay there.
The film, once again, defies expectation and logic, as it ushers the lead character and the audience in a wonderful and mysterious labyrinth of corridors and rooms the camera shots in a complex, ceaseless, smooth, spellbinding manner, reminiscent of the riveting and sophisticated observation of another maze of corridors and rooms, in director Alain Resnais’s powerful 1961 film, “L’année dernière à Marienbad”, the pictures extolling this time the graceful architecture of traditional Persia.
Nardaneh eventually reaches a lavish room where lies listless, actually lifeless, a man from another time. Seven arrows are planted in his torso. A cup with a lid that is filled with almonds stands ready to get opened and so is a book. A voice is suddenly heard, its origin impossible to ascertain for both the character and the audience, explaining Nardaneh must read the stories the book relates, one each day, after eating almonds, and must draw after each reading, draw one arrow from the inert body. Once all the seven stories are told and the seven arrows disposed of, it would be possible to awake the warrior and to live with him.
So our well-known Sleeping Beauty meets the narrative logic of “The Arabian Nights”. But the film does not only tweaks these oriental and western references (the beauty is actually a bulky bearded fellow and one thousand is reduced to seven). It uses them to weave a tapestry of subplots and images that rely explicitly on Iran’s oldest cultural traditions. “Atash-e sabz – The Green Fire” is crafted like poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s “Shahnama”: it is thus a collection of narratives outliving any lead character but instead developing across centuries around a symbol that resonates with the Iranian people and their history, a broad sweep across eras and through the human experience, with fate and tragedy always lurking to crush the various tales’ characters. If Ferdowsi built an epic unparalleled to what the West has produced around the importance of the monarchy, the film does not always centers on the rise and fall of kingdoms: with a story built around a prestigious musician and references to literary culture and folk traditions, it delves into an even deeper dimension of national identity than mere politics. And the film gets even more complex as it moves back and forth from the ancient times evoked by the book and what occurs to Nardaneh as she reads, a context which is itself somehow unworldly, cut from the period she was with her parents and even more the time during which the film began, and even, briefly, back and worth from these periods to her own childhood.
Voice once again mystifies as her magical story unfolds: the bass, grave voice of a narrator, seemingly but oddly springing from the book’s pages, reads the text but Nardaneh’s own voice right away sounds like an echo. Is the reader aware of what she does or is she under a spell? Can a tale define the life of the reader – clearly, Nardaneh accepts the rules and stays in the fortress without ever thinking about leaving, under the spell of the bizarre situation, but then, what is she expecting? Is the tale the reader? Visually, the actress playing this Nardaneh who is so busy in the fortress also plays key female parts in the various tales read to the sleeping warrior, from the daughter of a mythical village chief to a cruel queen. Her name can even be used in the stories.
She is not the only one: those playing her father and mother are also featured in most of the stories, in various, quite different parts. Her father’s name is the name of the book’s first male hero, who turns out to be a mythical name of Persian history: Haftvad, who, thanks to her daughter, owned a magical worm making his relatives and his village rich, decided to conquer the Kerman region to create his own kingdom, but was ultimately defeated by a more powerful king, who was the founder of the great Sasanian dynasty (in 226 CE). This confusion is uncanny and thrilling: it is as if the characters are also key stereotypes, the living are also an echo of the past, whether imagined or real, like fiction, history, and life are also intertwined, and not just separate elements, both a whole and the parts of a wider experience.
The pattern of her weird experience is disrupted by the arrival of a maidservant, a young woman a group of traveling artists sold to Nardaneh. Far from being helpful, the maidservant turns out to be a nasty character who cunningly breaks this pattern to her own benefit, breaking also the pattern the film has followed: the reading of the tales moves from the fifth tale to the seventh, skipping the sixth, while the camera instead relates how the maidservant takes Nardaneh’s place next to the sleeping warrior and wakes him up. As predicted from the start, the warrior, who is named Bahram, falls in love with the woman he sees near him and the maidservant can claim to be the real master while Nardaneh is forced to become the servant of the couple, following in fact the pattern of many of the lead characters of the tales she read, always doomed to get defeated and hurt, if not killed. Tragedy seems the only option available.
This is where the old story of the Sang-e Sabor enters the film. Embittered, Nardaneh asks Bahram, who goes on a trip for business and also to buy gifts for the woman he thinks was destined for him but also for that graceful servant he likes to talk with, to bring her a Patient Stone. If Bahram does not understand, the audience is surely appreciating this reference to the Persian lore which widens the reach of the film. An archetypal representation of the highly empathetic listener, the Sang-e Sabor is a confident for people eager to express their pain, sorrow, discontent, or disappointment. As Nardaneh is both a character who has been cheated and trampled but has also been the face of many tragic characters featured in the magical book, a reader who could be identified with different plights and is getting through a plight of her own, a woman aware of the broad sweep of history and caught in a transcendental experience, her query may reflect the desperate need of an entire nation to confide their misfortune in the hope it could vanish (according to the folk tale, once the Patient Stone is filled with too much complaints it shatters and solace and peace come).
Things would not play out for the pert young woman who has stolen Nardaneh’s destiny: she is beset by remorse and fate proves eventually to be cruel. Mirrors get back in the film, not just a cause for argument but as a revelation of the impossibility of an ugly nature to prevail. Nardaneh can at long last become the woman Bahram was destined to love. But then another twist occurs, smartly bringing back the meandering film back to the time and space where it began: the trial that the court clerk’s voice called for does take place and proves to be a heartbreaking reunion between Nardaneh and her now older parents and also a reunion between other key characters. And it would deeply puzzle and upset the judge.
The final, stupendous and splendid, shot is an even more striking gathering, not only because of the variety of characters but also because of the variety of images within the frame. The intriguing coda is a befitting conclusion of the remarkable effort by director Mohammad Reza Aslani to explore both old Persian and Western visual arts to tell his elaborate and elegant narrative. The old miniatures coexist with compositions reminiscent of milestones of the old European masters in a global, coherent vision that willfully and gladly overlooks borders and periods, in keeping with the narrative contents of “Atash-e sabz”. Shot by a camera loving to glide smoothly around the faces in the same dainty motion it used to explore architecture, a camera tirelessly displaying and celebrating the beauty of women, buildings, and landscapes, the movie stands as an epic poem on its own right, fully using the power of cinema and a whole range of references to delve into a nation’s identity and to praise its people’s resilience despite the many tragedies they suffered. Thirty years after the stunning “Shatranj-e baad – Chess of Wind” Aslani delivers another masterpiece that is visually bold and lavish and narratively intricate and ambitious.