A unusual, unhappy, sombre film from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose final entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a narrative about the randomness of life in the large metropolis, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV cleaning soap really feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it’s about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a person – nevertheless shiftless, informal and low-status – can in some way pull rank on a girl in the marriage market.
Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) performs Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a sure roguish ladies-man attraction whose single standing raises eyebrows amongst some of his acquaintances, however who’s now engaged to Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar). She is a brilliant, hardworking hospital nurse who’s widowed and lives together with her sister Mehri (Soha Niasti) and mum (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee), and her two children. Teen son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) is all the time in hassle at college and has a breezy method of sweet-talking his mom into forgiving him and youthful sister Neda (Arshida Dorostkar).
Hamid isn’t precisely a catch, however behaves implicitly as if Mahnaz’s two kids imply that he’s the one being a saint. He insists that the kids are absent from the home when his dad and mom come spherical, and that each one their issues are hidden away as Mahnaz’s future parents-in-law don’t find out about them and would possibly cease the marriage. Mahnaz, towards her higher judgment, parks the kids with the grumpy father of her late husband. The assembly with Hamid’s dad and mom goes forward and horrible occasions are set in practice together with one which is, maybe bafflingly, by no means proven on digital camera and its perpetrator by no means proven explaining it or discussing it – although an enigma is presumably the level.
Maadi’s efficiency coolly conveys how slippery a person Hamid is: accustomed to being adored for his supposedly endearing method with a gallant comment, however shrill and self-pitying when challenged on something. He is working a shabby, corrupt little rip-off: permitting individuals to sleep in the ambulances when they aren’t getting used, for an exploitative money cost. And there are indicators that Hamid has a roving eye and he’s nonetheless (instinctively) hitting on different girls.
From this tense scenario (in which the recreation is patriarchally rigged towards Mahnaz in ways in which she couldn’t dream of) a disaster happens – in reality a double disaster – which sends Mahnaz right into a rage-filled confrontation with each single man in her life, together with the choleric schoolteacher Mr Samkhanian (Maziar Seyyedi) who expelled Aliyar towards his colleague’s recommendation. The tragic and startling occasions emerge in a film whose storytelling model is in any other case very low-key, and which supplies an nearly weird and sudden high quality to all the heartbreaking emotional pain; that is the unexpectedness of actual life, maybe.
Izadyar’s full-throttle efficiency reveals how anguish has made her a sort of ghost, haunting a world that she had hoped to occupy as a modestly contended human being. It is slightly overwrought, although carried by the forthright performances.
