In this month full of blockbusters, The Persian Shadows represents with Limbo This ambitious cinema, full of ideas, far from the Hollywood tropes you've seen a hundred times. Immediate boarding for Iran, where your doubles don't want you just good...
Bottled opening
Fine drizzle, a quiet traffic jam. Resigned. Not those that are rhythmic by the cracked doors, horns and insults. Just a wait. And a passage from the passenger compartment of a camera that hesitates. A little like a Predator subjective view that would seek its prey. The sound atmosphere of each car believes before being supplanted by that of the previous car and so on, sometimes superimposed on futile conversations or music sheets soon forgotten. Then the paneling stops, the camera goes back and attaches itself to a car and its two occupants. The prey seems all chosen...
A few bits of captured dialogues before the passenger sitting in the place of death, a self-school monitor visibly, stares intensely behind the camera. A concern in the eye. The plan remains fixed, never gives way to the back-up, increasing in the spectator a feeling of unease that will run throughout the Persian Shadows. And the monitor ends up pulling out of the cabin by abandoning her student, all to follow a man – her man, we learn later – to the bottom of a building where she sees him get into an apartment and join the silhouette of a woman...
The opening of OPersian mbres is a promise of what will – and will not – be the entire feature film. An incursion into the genre of course – this fearful look that sets a counter-field that we are not allowed to see, a clear spring and very well executed fear – but above all an exploration of the false-semblance. A word that is not chosen at random since the film of Mani Haghighi (Pig, Valley of stars, etc.) is indeed in line with the False appearances of Cronenberg and all the subsequent films dealing with the very Borgesian idea of double.
In this case, Persian Shadows, a double squared since it is a couple that it is: Farzaneh and Jalal, falling on their true copies Bita and Mohsen (incarnate both by the same actors, Taraneh Alidoosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh). Scenario at all points similar in its lukewarm configuration Overlays, from Denmark and presented to NIFFF this year. But where the Scandinavian film is lost in an ultra-expected scenario mixing inconsistencies and absolutely not credible behaviors, the Iranian film prefers trouble, the grey zone. In a word, hence its title: shadows. And there lies all the strength of the feature film, the one that instead of making it cliché and expected, makes it a film every time surprising and much deeper than it first looks.
Double actors, double trouble
And there, Haghighi's two-pronged entanglement: on the one hand, to give life to a film about the nicked theme of the Doppelgänger and, on the other hand, to make live on the screen his double couple by achieving enough characterization of his characters so that the spectator knows in each plane he is dealing with (in short, what face of the mirror he is looking at). For if the short story of supposed deception (described above) launches the film, it is to better confront these two couples-mirrors.
And by a subtle game mixing micro-expressions, tics of language or even gait, this duo of actors put to power 2 succeeds brilliantly in characterizing each of the two roles that they must embody, without ever becoming caricatural or falling into a heavy exaggeration. A goldsmith's job, allowing to inject meaning into each interaction (typically, the troubled look of the kid when his mother gets replaced by her mother-mirror).
Rainy wedding, happy wedding?
However, we quickly understand that the film wants to offer us something deeper than a simple duplication story. An atmosphere largely emanating from the sound universe of the film, its borrowings to the genre (we were talking about the out-of-field, but let's talk about this corridor where the light is perpetually extinguished, the first fruits evident to horror) and its troubling tables of music, but also about this weather in constant lag: throughout the film, it rains. It rains day as night. It rains especially when the sun is high. What inspires this exchange between the couple's wife and her stepfather:
« The sky is clear but there is a storm. It doesn't make sense. / What makes no sense? / That. All this! I don't understand. In any case, it's way beyond us. That's why you have to stop questioning yourself. »
Four replicas to put at the frontispiece of the Persian Shadows they sum up the feature film perfectly. Better, this dialogue which resonates gladly as a promise to the spectator who must not, at least at the first viewing, begin to torture his mind in an attempt to intertwine the elements between them and at all costs record what he sees in any rationality. Just let yourself be carried by the image of Haghighi. And unlike a Nolan who loses all flavor if his spectator stops wanting to think (Tenet does not have any interest when one stops wanting to mentally rebuild the temporality of the film), let oneself be carried by The Persian Shadows It's the assurance to grasp it perfectly...
Storm warning
The poisonous atmosphere distilled by this strange thriller will chop its spectator in any way. And this disturbing very Freudian strangeness will suffice in itself. However, it is understandable that this constant storm that irrigates the plan is not there by chance. Generally suddenly, uncontrollable, a « God's will » acting on the plane as aesthetically – we talked about it for the recent films of Soi Cheang, Mad Fate and Limbo – as metaphorically (the inevitable climax, reversal, passage, cf. Moonrise Kingdom, Back to the future or Unforgiving to name but a few). Here, on the contrary, the storm is neither confined to a few protagonists, nor restricted temporally: it crosses the entire feature film.
Societal storm
A warning no doubt, a threat just as surely. The same thing that hangs on every Iranian resident – it's not Jafar Pahani who will say otherwise, his No bears speaks for him – locked in this constant societal pressure imposed by the country's theocracy. A pressure to bring forth a duplicity – the real self and the self dictated by society – as disturbing as schizophrenic, to the point of questioning the desires of the characters. This mirror couple can as well be ideal for a connection of destiny that would never have happened that the real self detached from societal constraints. To every spectator to make his own opinion...
Persian Shadows drawing through a film with a fantastic vein assumed as much a striking social observation as a real gripping thriller, which makes him one of the most interesting releases of this July yet filled with very commented films. To be registered with Limbo, in the feature films to be supported in front of the monstrous mastodonts ready to roll on our screens.
Enthusiastic return that can only intrigue!
Same one! 😉