Dast-neveshtehaa nemisoosand/ Manuscripts Don't Burn Probably the most resonant of the stew of new releases pouring through the national weeks here is this latest production by Mohammad Rasoulof, still under his twenty year prohibition from film making but out of the jail, where he was sent for undermining the Iranian state with his movies - and now possibly restrained within it’s borders or possibly living in Hamburg, where the interiors of this film were shot. Information is hard to come by.
Local press coverage was predictably non existent and a $35 a head price tag forbidding (must admit the buffet was tasty but they didn’t do free drinks for reasons more ideological than economic). However to the audience that did make it past those barriers, mainly the local Persian community in their best clothes, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is the most confronting film they are likely to encounter. Several Iranian viewers found it irredeemably grim.
Commentators squirm away from questioning the appropriateness of using agit prop as up-market entertainment. Here it was clearly the intention of Rasoulof and his anonymous associates that their work reach a wide international audience via art cinema showing and their straight ahead treatment of secret police activity wipes away even the most sober of what we are used to, films like The Lives of Others or A Most Wanted Man - no bursting through the door pistols at the ready or black clad, absielling SWAT teams here.
Less well know than fellow sentenced director Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof had appeared to be
the lesser artist but this new film is more substantial than any of their earlier work.
The parallel lives of a duo of assassins and the intellectuals they persecute are shown in
washed out digital colour and scope.
We kick off with Morteza the driver (reputably Rasoulof himself) waking in the parked, window fogged car and heading off to pick up a blood stained colleague running from a pursuer. He asks him “Is he dead?” The new comer is more concerned with finding an ATM, needing money for his young son to go into a hospital which won’t accept him without the fee in advance.
Action switches to a middle class home with washing on a clothes line in the living room, and a poet friend calling on the wheel chain bound husband. When alone, they talk about clandestine book publication. The Net’s more a tool of the hedonist youth, which did not share their forty year old struggle. They finish their discussion from the down stairs doorway, using the intercom because the ‘phones are tapped. However a headphone wearing surveillance officer is watching from a vehicle with its windows covered.
In an office with a photo of the Ayatollahs on the wall, an official censor strikes out a news paper passage. He visits his one time associate, urging him to turn over a MSS about a ”bus incident” in order to obtain permission to leave the country and see his daughter before he dies. They exchange comments on the censor as a one time dissident himself , who now rejects his past as unpatriotic. The writer reluctantly complies, warning that copies he has distributed will be published if anything happens to him.
The two man hit squad has another assignment, though the ill child’s father wants to go to the hospital. He is refused but their employer uses his influence to have the child admitted. The driver says his associate should thank the man when they meet. Someone is locked in the boot with an improvised hood over his face.
The plot elements connect when they home in on the poet we have already seen, to find copies of the MSS and use him to gain an unobtrusive entry to the wheelchair bound writer’s flat. Their methods are chillingly plausible.
We learn the killer’s back story, which the film connects to an (allegedly genuine) 1995 Heyran Pass incident when a group dissidents were chosen for elimination by driving their coach into a ravine. Waiting for a victim to succumb, the hit man makes a sandwich from the contents of the refrigerator and shares it with his colleague.
The assassin father dreams the film’s one fantastic, violent image, himself in the shower with his son, as the water turns bloody.
The argument is detailed. "Fighting and change were 40 years ago. That's over now”, justification under Sharia, the evil “Cultural NATO”, printed books against the web, the country’s Chain Murders of the nineties, the boy witness, whose fate we never learn, is the same age as the ill child.
We have no way of telling how accurate a depiction of present day Iran we are seeing but the sober, well crafted film making carries conviction. As acts of defiance go this one must come near the top of the list. It should have been on TV at peak hours followed by a panel discussion but that’s someplace else. I guess without featuring a CIA plot it doesn’t qualify as serious.
Less well know than fellow sentenced director Jafar Panahi, Rasoulof had appeared to be
the lesser artist but this new film is more substantial than any of their earlier work.
The parallel lives of a duo of assassins and the intellectuals they persecute are shown in
washed out digital colour and scope.
We kick off with Morteza the driver (reputably Rasoulof himself) waking in the parked, window fogged car and heading off to pick up a blood stained colleague running from a pursuer. He asks him “Is he dead?” The new comer is more concerned with finding an ATM, needing money for his young son to go into a hospital which won’t accept him without the fee in advance.
Action switches to a middle class home with washing on a clothes line in the living room, and a poet friend calling on the wheel chain bound husband. When alone, they talk about clandestine book publication. The Net’s more a tool of the hedonist youth, which did not share their forty year old struggle. They finish their discussion from the down stairs doorway, using the intercom because the ‘phones are tapped. However a headphone wearing surveillance officer is watching from a vehicle with its windows covered.
In an office with a photo of the Ayatollahs on the wall, an official censor strikes out a news paper passage. He visits his one time associate, urging him to turn over a MSS about a ”bus incident” in order to obtain permission to leave the country and see his daughter before he dies. They exchange comments on the censor as a one time dissident himself , who now rejects his past as unpatriotic. The writer reluctantly complies, warning that copies he has distributed will be published if anything happens to him.
The two man hit squad has another assignment, though the ill child’s father wants to go to the hospital. He is refused but their employer uses his influence to have the child admitted. The driver says his associate should thank the man when they meet. Someone is locked in the boot with an improvised hood over his face.
The plot elements connect when they home in on the poet we have already seen, to find copies of the MSS and use him to gain an unobtrusive entry to the wheelchair bound writer’s flat. Their methods are chillingly plausible.
We learn the killer’s back story, which the film connects to an (allegedly genuine) 1995 Heyran Pass incident when a group dissidents were chosen for elimination by driving their coach into a ravine. Waiting for a victim to succumb, the hit man makes a sandwich from the contents of the refrigerator and shares it with his colleague.
The assassin father dreams the film’s one fantastic, violent image, himself in the shower with his son, as the water turns bloody.
The argument is detailed. "Fighting and change were 40 years ago. That's over now”, justification under Sharia, the evil “Cultural NATO”, printed books against the web, the country’s Chain Murders of the nineties, the boy witness, whose fate we never learn, is the same age as the ill child.
We have no way of telling how accurate a depiction of present day Iran we are seeing but the sober, well crafted film making carries conviction. As acts of defiance go this one must come near the top of the list. It should have been on TV at peak hours followed by a panel discussion but that’s someplace else. I guess without featuring a CIA plot it doesn’t qualify as serious.
