Not least among the many things to admire in Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof‘s “A Man of Integrity,” which won the top prize in Cannes‘ Un Certain Regard sidebar this year and also picked up best Director and Actor at the Antalya Film Festival, is that it exists at all. Rasoulof, in a similar situation to countryman Jafar Panahi, is largely banned from filmmaking in his country, recently had his passport revoked and sits beneath the Sword of Damocles that is a suspended prison sentence for dissident activity. The bizarre Catch-22 that is to be a filmmaker at work in, and now confined to, the one country in the world where your films will not be shown could drive a lesser director to distraction, but Rasoulof’s film, while understandably angry, is nothing if not singleminded . It’s a saturnine morality tale that unfolds in shades of rainy gray beneath leaden, overcast skies, gritting up the nation’s cinematic tradition of humanist drama to an almost unrecognizable degree.
Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad) has been living in a small town in rural Iran with his wife Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee) and young son for some time when the film begins, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not the sort of bucolic hamlet where newcomers are easily embraced. Despite Hadis’ stable position as head teacher of a local school, Reza is struggling to keep up payments on the plot of land on which their house stands, and on which he has set up a goldfish farm. For those aware that goldfish are an often short-lived part of the Nowruz (New Year) tradition in Iran, there’s already an ominous parallel between the expendable creatures and the lives of the people living under an oppressive social order, and that’s before the fish start to die. First it’s just a few little carcasses floating to the top of the teeming pond, but Reza, whom we have already seen refusing to participate in the local bribe economy, believes he knows who is responsible. His neighbor Abbas (Misagh Zare Zeinab) is a vicious local gangster, who works for “The Company” that is trying to buy up Reza’s land, and Reza immediately gets into a confrontation with him that lands him in jail.
The roundelay of bribery, blackballing and bureaucracy that Hadis and her brother endure trying to get Reza back is reminiscent of the dour social realism of the Romanian New Wave — indeed a lot of the interactions recall that feeling of futility in the face of the system most recently summoned in Cristian Mungiu’s “Graduation.” But the chief difference, apart from a possibly ill-advised turn into film noir melodramatics in the final stretch, is where Rasoulof locates the “blame” for the inevitable corruption of even the most principled man. In this microcosmic town in northern Iran, it seems less that decent people get crushed in the cogs of a massive, unfeeling machine, than that people are the problem in the first place. Here, within even the most apparently principled of men, there is a deeply-buried streak of venality that will eventually surface, given enough adversity. As one character tells Reza, “in this country, you’re either the oppressed or the oppressor,” and a great deal of the film’s slightly unwieldy 117-minute runtime is dedicated to observing just how much humble pie a proud man can eat, before his belly explodes and his inevitable journey from the former to the latter is complete.
Knotty and intriguing though the storyline is, the taciturn Akhlaghirad’s stonily impassive performance can try the sympathies at times, especially in the middle third when the endless misfortunes and knockbacks become overly repetitive. And it’s particularly unconvincing in the more outre moments, such as Reza’s visits to his literal man-cave (a steaming hot spring in a cavern so wildly at odds with the rest of the landscapes and color schemes that it seems at first like a dream) where he gets drunk on homemade watermelon hooch and broods, presumably about revenge.
Beizaee, by contrast, does a terrific job as the more pragmatic Hadis whose own descent into the moral quagmire is given an unusually evenhanded degree of respect by Rasoulof’s script. Until it isn’t. The dramatic, ironic twists in which the film culminates rather sell her out, which is a shame because the subplots about how she runs her school and how eventually she comes to abuse her own position of authority out of desperation, are just as powerful as anything that happens to her closed-off husband. “Men’s pride can lead to problems that can only be solved by women’s intelligence,” she tells a friend at one point, but here, her husband’s unbending pride is the problem: unlike her more flexible principles, his will snap.
The landscape out here is as bleak as the view of human fallibility. The goldfish that are among the only flashes of color in an otherwise unremittingly low-contrast palette, die en masse, to be picked off by a wheeling, cawing flock of crows in the film’s most overtly dramatic moment (elsewhere physical conflict and violence mostly happen offscreen). Dogs bark in the distance, rain spatters down unremittingly and the countryside is rendered in the same shades of gray as the unbeautiful traffic-choked streets and municipal buildings of Tehran. And the film is largely unleavened by any kind of humor, until the very end where a darkly operatic irony takes over, shifting the register from mulchy social realism into an almost theatrical nihilism.
Compelling as it is, and understandable though it might be that Rasoulof takes a pretty dim view of human nature, these extra turns of the screw can feel like overkill especially with their genre-noir overtones. “Life teaches everybody. Some learn quickly, some learn slowly. Some learn too much, some too little,” Reza is told at one point, but the speaker neglects to mention just exactly what the lesson is. Rasoulof seems sure, though: life, in his deterministically downbeat clockwork universe, will eventually teach all men of integrity how to have none. [B]