a return at the movies

So last week I watched Tala-yeh Sorkh (Crimson Gold) and Nema-yeh Nazdik (Close-Up) and it kinda made me miss Iran. Tala-yeh Sorkh was spectacular, and I'll write on it soon. Today, however, I want to explain why Nema-yeh Nazdik was such a blast to see. It has to do with the ending.

Kiarostami's movies, including this one, can seem to be shot from an emotionally inert perspective--the scenes are presented in such an intentionally bland, distanced way that real identification with the characters seems absurd. In Nema-yeh Nazdik, after a whole film's worth of this deadened viewing experience, a moment of simultaneous empathy and realization of the film's grand concept erupts.

In the main courtroom scene of the film, a static camera captures Sabzian pleading for leniency with pathetic platitudes on the importance of being an art lover. The younger Ahankhah, who clearly relishes his filmic moment in the sun just as much as the man in the dock, speaks in stilted prose no doubt practiced for the screen. My feeling here is that in this scene they were still working the kinks out of their “performances”--for me, this scene is capturing the actual trial, where the real-life chronology of the film’s construction begins. If one dissects Kiarostami’s likeliest creative progression (from magazine article to movie idea to actual movie), it makes sense that the first scenes shot in “real-life” chronology would have been his interview with Sabzian in jail, his interview with the Ahankhahs in their home and the courtroom scene. He had to wait until Sabzian was released from his sentence before he could shoot any of the “re-enacted” scenes with the Ahankhahs and Sabzian together.

In this interpretation, the final sequence, in which Sabzian meets his idol Makhmalbaf and re-encounters Agha-ye Ahankhah (both of which elicit tears of disbelief), becomes doubly poignant. Just then, the viewer sees that this is the moment when Sabzian realizes he is loved in spite of his ruse; that he is indeed going to star in his own movie. We also then realize that, in a way, the whole film—all the scenes prior, from the documentary footage of the trial to the odd and artificial interviews with the Ahankhahs and the policemen to the re-enacted scenes chronicling the fraud’s inception and defeat—can be seen as an elaborate rehabilitation effort for Sabzian and his misguided endeavor. We understand that Kiarostami, through ingenuity and careful chronological construction, and Makhmalbaf and the Ahankhahs, through their cooperation, were elevating Sabzian’s two-bit role-play, in spite of its banal message and directionless nature, into real “art”—which is what Sabzian wanted it to be all along. That these recognitions, for the viewer outside the film and Sabzian inside it, come simultaneously means the close of the film hits in a sudden empathic bang.

Partying

Ok so the dance party. I went to a birthday party thrown in the honor of my dorm brother from the Philippines, who has somehow made it his business to explore every facet of bilateral relations 'twixt his Island nation and the IRI, and it was weird and great. The party featured laconic Chinese-Filipino grandmothers, wistful Iranian shah-era engineers, half-Iranian-half-Sudanese big booty babes, confused kids and a dancefloor blazing with a heat lit by cross-cultural desires to escape the social hell that Iran represents--and by Sean Paul mp3's.

Marc and Nicholas and I arrive and are promptly served canned scotch and fanta, which begins to loosen us up. Whatever stayed tight was soon slackened by the blaring videos of the Persian Music Channel (thank god for satellite-wielding exiles) turned up by none other than the fifty-some-year-old divorcee owner of the apartment who was clearly looking to get his party started quickly. In a country where dancing in public is outlawed, making the music bump in the illegal direction in private is clearly a serious business.

Our Manilan mate, who'd had a head start on the liquor, immediately began coaxing all who'd listen on to the dance floor. Jamming first to the PMC TV tunes and then, when they got too slow-jammy to break a sweat to, the endless supply of uptempo techno (so popular in Iran) on the computer, he grabbed anyone in reach for a dance. With moves reminiscent of the funkier individuals I've seen at stateside parties, he managed to get everybody in a fluid mood and forget that we were in the middle of a police state. Or perhaps reminded us that even if we were, we could at least rock our bodies in spite of it. All--from nervous 11-year olds to tired grannies--wore broad smiles and sweat rings from the disco inferno. Lacuesta, leave it to the Filipinos to turn it up a notch.

The punk-rock party a couple days earlier, while it lacked the intergenerational appeal of the dance party, was perhaps even more surprising. I was already aware from my knowledge of the US club scene, especially DC's (hello, ESL/Deep Dish/MCCXXIII/etc.), that Iranians had a hankering for clubbin'. What I didn't know was that a true rock and roll scene existed among the youth. I'd met a lot of young people in Iran and scarcely a one had expressed knowing who Guns and Roses were, much less punk rock. But when I arrived at the secret, underground (truly, two levels below the pavement) location in the tony Elahieh district of Tehran I was flabbergasted.

Punk rock rituals which have long since grown inane to me (moshing, chain wallets, west-coast-punk-style covers of George Michael tunes) suddenly took on the revolutionary cast their original creators imagined they would at their antique inception. These kids' idle rebellion of beer and joints and largely tuneless wailing, now so moribund in their native context, became truly cathartic all over againin that Tehran parking garage basement.

Many of the teenagers had lived for some years in North America or Europe and could naturally walk the punk rock walk. Having been thrown by circumstance back into this oppressive Iranian atmosphere, however, the pose was no longer just a pose but a real chance to vent frustration at regime far more repressive than any faced by the Sex Pistols or Minor Threat. The sweat I spilled and smashed toes I suffered all helped add up to the most vital punk rock experience I'd had in years.

Private Iran

Okay greetings all--it certainly has been a while. I've been going to class, bellyaching about internship applications, suffering a brief but intense bout of food poisoning (from mexican food, ironically) and generally doing my Tehran thing. The most interesting things I've been up to lately, though, have been all the time i've spent in the other Iran, the one that happens behind closed doors.

This past weekend I went to Qazvin with my roommate Noor. He had gone through the intensive Persian program there and still had a number of friends there that he'd been meaning to visit and invited me to come along. After a first night in the dorms where I was everyone's pet American/foreign policy sounding board (nearly all were Arabs, including a couple from Palestine, none had ever met an American before) we hit the town. I thought we might do some sightseeing but instead we went shopping. We stopped by the local black market moneychanger, the bootleg Tehrangeles dissident CD salesman's and the coffeeshop where we sat with the owner sipping frappucino-like confections, decrying the state of affairs in the country and flirting with the girls at the next table (the endeavor yielded one phone number--the group was joyous). Later that night after I met up with some other of Noor's friends I ended up staying over at an apartment of a couple of guys from the Gulf states. There, there was popcorn and pomegranate juice and vcds of dancing girls recorded off of lebanese tv and even some softcore skin flicks.

The next night, at the apartment of a local who we knew, there was no let-up in the flouting of sharia, complete with alcohol, political discussion and qalyun, a delightful fruit-flavored tobacco water pipe smoke-up that has roots far too deep and wide in Iranian culture to be stamped out by something as piddly as the mullahs' recent ban of its public use.

I need to go but I promise to write again soon--I still haven't told you about the underground (literally, under ground) punk rock party or the fun-for-all-ages Hi-NRG dance/birthday party. O Iran, Iran Iran.

Gilan, etc.

Much of Gilan must be seen to be believed. With its puzzlingly lush forests and grassy hillsides, humid seaside weather and villages (like Masouleh, the one in which I stayed) that are so quaint as to give the French countryside of popular imagination a run for its money, the area is my favorite of those I've visited thus far.

Sensing (correctly, if I'm a decent test case) that tourists will love Masouleh, the Iranian government has enacted a five-year plan. For the past three years, and the next two, my classmate Neda's uncle has been supervising a structural overhaul of the entire village. A restorative architect with experience on mosques, monuments and churches in Iran and Italy, he now has oversight over the restoration of the entire town. Not that it's much of a town ordinary sense.

Masouleh is a haphazard collection of buildings dug into a steep hillside, with structures terraced one on top of the other. A my-patio-is-your-roof kind of affair. Things looked to be in good enough shape structurally--i never felt as though the roof was about to cave in while visiting any homes--but with Iranian notions of time (and soemtimes, work ethic) I'm afraid the five-year plan will become a seven or eight year one. And while I applaud the Islamic Republic for funding this restoration and think it will improve "The Masouleh Experience" for tourists, I can't help but think (as I perpetually do here) that all this would be better if only the women could take off all those extraneous layers and we could all have a beer or two. Just a thought, fellas.

A highlight was our simple outdoor meal of sangak, beef kabob and doogh. Sangak, a tasty sort of flat bread cooked on hot pebbles that has an appealingly chewy crust, is something I adore already, but when wrapped around a fresh hunk of beef (likely from one of the odd, goatlike mountain cows everpresent in the region) the taste was overwhelmingly good. The doogh? Well I normally don't do doogh, as something about the notion of a salty yogurt drink seasoned with herbs has never rang the 'refreshing' bell in my head but this time it was really good. Not too much salt, lots of mint and, lacking the customary bowl of yogurt at the table at this two-men-a-grill-and-some-bread kind of establishment, it filled a necessary hole.

Okay folks, I'd better make it to class.

Oh and I swam in the Caspian. Very warm water and sand the color of Turkish coffee.

More on Isfahan

So the trip to Isfahan was a mighty American weekend. I spent it with my new friends Marc, Neda and Nicholas, all grad students in International Politics at AU, and with our loud English conversations and fair complexions (excepting Neda, the stealth American) we made a big splash among the locals. Despite Isfahan's justified reputation as a touristy place (we were asked countless times if we were interested in guided tours of every medieval Persian building we went to and nearly as many times if we were interested in buying a carpet), passersby were sufficiently surprised and jazzed about our presence to repeatedly wave and shout "Hello mister!," and the like. At first we basked in this attention and paused frequently to answer folks' questions about 'Amrika,' our thoughts on Iranians and whether Isfahan was more beautiful than Tehran (yes, it was). After a day-long honeymoon with the the perks of rockstar treatment however, we realized we couldn't get some folks to cease and desist (the wild-eyed Muhammad comes to mind) so on the second day we took to telling people we were from Canada--a sure conversation stopper.

Despite it being a holiday weekend--some descendent of the prophet's death day--the sights were, compared to those in say, Rome (or Philadelphia for that matter), attended by very manageable, largely Iranian crowds. We were not the only foreigners in town but sometimes it felt like we'd seen every foreigner in town. There was the half-Iranian, half-German family with the teenage boys with the long, lank black hair (the precursor to their expatriate father's long strawy gray ones). The French family with the young man in the wheelchair. The Canadian hippy who made the mistake of letting the aforementioned Muhammad lead him through the bazaar). After a day of sightseeing and shopping and catching glimpses of each other, we would reconvene at the palatial (see URL below) Abbasi hotel for afternoon tea, or dinner or late-night Turkish coffee. We traded scarcely a word (save for a request to snap a picture one time at the Imam Mosque) but there was an unspoken bond in our shared decisions to travel to this pariah state.

Just before leaving town, as I got up from the dinner table in the stately hotel courtyard, two Iranian youngsters (sister, 15 and brother, 13) approached me with big grins and asked me where I was from. Already feeling wistful for the salad days of my arrival two days earlier, I told them America. We ended up talking for a very long time, about subjects as wide as the lack of paper towels, napkins and toilet paper in Iran (Kleenex serves all those purposes here), my rock band in New York (hooray Cologne, we resume our exploits soon), whether I had met any of the actors from the Harry Potter movies (I had to admit I didn't even know their names),and--of course--whether our countries' governments could ever get along (probably not, we decided). After a couple last questions from their late-arriving sister (9 years old) like "what is your favorite fruit?" (peaches) and "what do people eat for breakfast in America?" (bread, only different kinds than here), we exchanged e-mails, snapped a cellphone photo and parted. Definitely ended my trip on a good note.

Unless you count the overnight bus ride as the end of the trip. That wasn't a very good note at all.

quickie

went to isfahan and unexpectedly stayed at this hotel.  www.abbasihotel.com.  it and the city were both incredible.

i've had the misfortune of having been intermittently blocked from viewing my own blog.  update, yes.  view no.  i'll get to the bottom of this...we'll talk later. 

 

Mazandaran, Oh my.

So I've spent the last few days in Qa'emshahr, a city in Mazandaran, one of Iran's Caspian provinces. My roommate Noor was good enough to arrange a stay up there with the family of a friend of his, Milad.

Calling from a sofrekahne (traditional restaurant and tea house) en route we had learned that a close friend of Milad's father had died the day before and therefore wondered whether a visit just then was such a good idea. Milad's grandfather, in whose hands Milad's mobile had inexplicably fallen, assured us that it was all right. We were well past halfway there anyway.

About an hour before reaching Qa'emshahr, After our driver had empited his packed car of the passengers other than us foreigners, we were told to get out of the comfortable newish Samand sedan in which we'd been riding and move our things into a dubious-looking Paykan. This didn't sound good to me. Noor, whose 16 months in Iran to my week-and-a-half gives him a big-time linguistic advantage, was able to suss out that our driver, despite assuring us back in Tehran that he could take us all the way to Qa'emshahr, decided he was too tired to get us there. It was late, perhaps 1:30 by then, and traffic had been awful over the Alborz Mountains, so he passed us off (along with some of our money) to another driver who knew the area better and was heading our way. Other than the new ride being a dud car it was not all that bad--we were as tired as the driver and wanted to get going.

As it turned out however, our new driver didn't know Qa'emshahr as well as he'd led our man to believe (the address we gave registered a blank exprtession) and after another 40 minutes of driving we stopped yet again. At first we thought it was just for directions but when the trunk popped open and our bags made another great migration to another (even worse) Paykan's trunk it was clear that we were trading down again. This time the ride was not even a private hire (darbast, or 'closed door') so we squeezed in with some tired workmen and hoped for the best.

After another few instances of poorly masked directional ineptitude by our third (and thankfully final) driver we made it to Milad's family's home. All but Milad himself had long since gone to bed but his welcome was a warm one, in the traditional Iranian style. By this I mean he immediately beseached us to sit down, drink tea and eat fruit. We were happy to oblige.

Milad's father's friend death had not cast the pall over the household we had worried it would. Mother, sister and son all seemed to be far more concerned with the pressing elements of their own lives (summer school, weight loss, doctor's appointments, providing sufficient hospitality for foreign guests, choosing amongst all the deodorant scents) than with managing their grief.

The father, however, was emotional. When we first got a chance to speak with him (other than a cursory introduction when Milad took us by his carpet shop), his feelings swung toward the effusive--in his praise for America, his distaste for the current political climate in Iran, his almost demonstratively robust manner of peeling, salting and eating his cucumber. He had invited a few friends to come home home with him after work to sip a cold one (unappetizingly spiked with canned Turkish gin) before their fallen chum's memorial service and while the porch sipping was clearly a delight, a certain giddiness underlay the mirth, as if everyone knew that little but crying would come later.

And it did. At the funeral parlor, a building with a small indoor area (air-conditioned and set aside for the ladies) and a large courtyard, the closest among the dead fellow's family and friends gathered to chat, sip tea, and ultimately and most intently, listen to songs of mourning. One among the man's friends was a singer of poetry and devotional songs, and his musical evocations, apparently partly improvised, sent much of the crowd toward fits of sobbing. Milad's father, the man set with the task of holding the singer's lyrics before him as he sang, wept particularly thoroughly, and at one moment when he'd taken a break to have a cigarette, was sufficeintly unaware of his surroundings to prevent the singer's tea from spilling over his lyric sheets. Once it had happened, he sheepishly took the sheets, one by one, and held then at a safe but still efficacious distance over one of the myriad candles that ringed the cement floor of the courtyard to dry them off.