‘A Hero’: Asghar Farhadi’s Moral Quandary Film Questions The Weight of a Good Deed [Cannes Review]

In “A Hero” (“Ghahreman”), Asghar Farhadi blurs the line of innocence and guilt in a fraught drama about the true weight of a good deed. During a two-day reprieve from prison, Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) and his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) discover a handbag full of golden coins. Though Rahim briefly debates selling them to help offset the cost of his debts to Braham (Mohsen Tanabandeh), the gold exchange rate is unsatisfactorily low, and he resolves to track down the original owner and return them. A tearfully grateful woman comes forward as the bag’s original owner, and Rahim’s sister Mali (Maryam Shahdaei) willingly hands them over—an act that conveniently happens to be good press for Rahim’s prison. With a little help from a local charity, the good deed becomes something of a local fascination, and Rahim is no longer an anonymous debt-ridden prisoner but instead a celebrated good samaritan. Yet when more details emerge about the woman who claimed the bag, Rahim’s good deed is put into question, as well as his public image.

More and more layers of moral complexity accumulate, and soon enough, Farhadi has spun an ethical thought experiment that would make Immanuel Kant’s head spin. Though “A Hero” has accrued a reputation as a film about morality in the few first reactions since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s really a film about the optics of morality and what moral acts look like when subjected to the microscope of public opinion. A selfless act may have a net positive effect, but when its circumstances and motivations are suspect, a good samaritan starts looking like a villain. Ethically complicated and structurally reminiscent of the Safdie brothers’ “Uncut Gems” (2019), “A Hero” delivers a nuanced examination of justice—and the many shades of injustice that surround it.

“A Hero” marks three years since “Everybody Knows” (2018), Farhadi’s last entry at Cannes, a fairly banal kidnapping drama starring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. “A Hero” features decidedly fewer mystery elements and intense chase scenes, and perhaps as a result, its first act is rather slow on the uptake, preferring to acquaint its audiences with its characters through gradual development. Yet a second act complication about the handbag owner escalates the plot, and soon the stakes are high. Whether Rahim will be freed from prison rests on his ability to salvage his public image and repay his debts to Braham. Moreover, he has dependents on the outside; Siavash, Rahim’s anxious son who struggles with a stutter, seems particularly aimless after his mother’s re-engagement to a new man. It’s through Siavash’s eyes that Farhadi pinpoints the urgency of Rahim’s struggle to escape incarceration, Siavash for whom Rahim’s reincarceration may effectively spell parental abnegation. “I don’t think my dad’s a liar,” he says in one scene, and his desperation is apparent, whereas Jadidi plays Rahim’s with a kind of blank, smiling numbness.

Rahim maintains his hangdog smile until the very end, trying to keep up appearances as he points out to the news anchor interviewing him the place where he supposedly found the bag, stretching the truth only slightly. Like in most lies, those slight prevarications become pivotal plot points by the end, the little inconsistencies that complicate Rahim’s case infinitely more. Who exactly found the bag, and when? What was Rahim’s original plan for the money? Who was the woman who claimed the bag as hers? Such layered dramas run the risk of muddling the story with too many subplots, but Farhadi keeps these questions in the air like juggling pins, constantly in motion yet not so convoluted they confuse their audience.

Still, Farhadi posits that the juggling act looks different to its onlookers. As suspicion mounts about Rahim’s intentions and a reckless reaction to an off-the-cuff remark are captured on surveillance footage, the social media explosion threatens Rahim’s prospects of freedom even more. Perhaps Farhadi’s central question is not “What constitutes a moral act,” but rather “How does an act change in ethicality with its shifting perception?” Though we keep waiting for a last-minute plot twist, Farhadi seems steadfast in the belief that whether an act is ethical is irrelevant if it has already entered the court of public opinion. This is perhaps one of Farhadi’s more tiresome intellectual discourses, lurching toward the dreaded modern tangle of cancel culture—particularly for such a spider’s web of a film that, until that point, has had the timeless character specificity and moral complexity of a Kafka novel or Chekhov story. Yet the film’s last frames, which counterbalance captivity and freedom in equal measure, return to a crooked balance. [B]

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