Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (42 page)

Eventually, Tom caught up with Jerry. In November 1999 Shamsolvaezin was put on trial on charges stemming from articles in
Neshat
that criticized capital punishment and the Islamic law of “an eye for an eye.” He was also charged with forging the signature of the author of an article faxed to him from abroad, despite testimony to the contrary from the author himself. Shamsolvaezin turned the trial into a political circus, provoking a storm of criticism, some of it pretty foolish, from the conservative clerical hierarchy. (One ayatollah’s comment—“Belief in equal rights for all citizens is worse than cow worship”—was my personal favorite.)

In the end, Shamsolvaezin was convicted of forgery. Outside the courtroom, Shamsolvaezin called his conviction “the price of democracy.” He joked, “A few years ago intellectuals and reformists would be given capital punishment or otherwise would be physically eliminated. Now we are only getting jail terms. This is a step forward!” But he made no secret of his disappointment in President Khatami, who he believed had failed to use the authority of his office to follow through on his promises. “It was the President, after all, who had first unleashed the slogans of ‘political development’ and a ‘civil society,’” he said. “The price for these slogans is being paid by society, not the government, and the independent newspapers are paying a large part of this price.”

After Shamsolvaezin lost his appeal, he was sent to Evin prison.

Then in April 2000,
Jameah’s
fifth incarnation,
Asr-e Azadegan
, was closed by the Judiciary along with sixteen other reformist publications. The publications were accused of “disparaging Islam and the religious elements of the Islamic revolution.” But it seemed premature to write the obituary of a free press that had been so inventive in the past. “We are not destroyers, we are reformers,” Jalaeipour said just before the crackdown. “We are in favor of making government responsive, institutionalizing the sovereignty of law and not undermining it in the name of religion, revolution, and war.”

After the crackdown, Jalaeipour told Nazila, “I remain very optimistic. Even if the same newspapers do not publish, other ones will take their place. There’s no turning back.”

What is happening in the movies is as intellectually subversive as what is happening in the press. Iranian cinema is a world unto its own, by far the most creative expression of the Iranian imagination, so much so that it has earned a glowing international reputation. Iranian filmmakers relentlessly test the limits of what is permissible in a cultural environment still largely controlled by a rigid interpretation of Islam.

Granted, there remains an unreality about the portrayal of everyday life in Iranian films and television programs. Personal relationships are sanitized because a film, unlike real private life, is shown to men and women alike, and to them all the actors are strangers. On the screen, female characters have to keep their heads covered and hide the shape of their bodies, even in scenes of home life; they cannot dance or sing in the company of other women. Husbands and wives are not allowed to touch, and parents cannot show physical affection to their children once a daughter is nine and a son is thirteen—the legal age to get married. It is thought that such actions might inflame the passions of male viewers. Many filmmakers simply ignore the thorny issue of how to show male-female relationships by making movies about children instead.

But since the late 1980s, the Iranian cinema has quietly emerged as another public space in which the tensions, restrictions, grim reality, and simple pleasures of everyday life are laid out for all to see. Family values, sibling affection, idyllic country life, and the triumph of good over evil are not the only topics; polygamy, suicide, war, murder, mental illness, divorce, infertility, tribal oppression, unemployment, adultery, crossdressing, social inequality, mixed-sex parties, drug addiction, wife-beating, child abuse, and poverty are all explored on the screen as well, even when they cannot be explicitly acted out.

A full-length feature film can cost less than $100,000 to make and filmmakers have found ways to raise money and get around some of the restrictions. The government-run Farabi Cinema Foundation and even the Ministry of Islamic Guidance struggle to provide funds and slip them through the cracks. Sometimes when a film is banned inside Iran, it is screened at a film festival abroad, which creates pressure on the censors to reverse themselves. Sometimes two versions of a film are made—an original for foreign distribution, a sanitized version for domestic consumption. Some filmmakers enjoy special privileges. Abbas Kiarostami, probably Iran’s best-known filmmaker, often produces his films through The Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, a politically tame venue. He also relegates women to the periphery, saying that he doesn’t like to portray unrealistic characters in his films.

I saw the fluidity of the system one summer evening at an invitation-only screening at Tehran’s House of Cinema. I was invited through Nargess, my oldest friend in Iran, who knows a lot of people in the movie business. This was no glittery Hollywood affair. The men did not wear black tie. The women were dressed in drab, loose coats with scarves covering their heads. No refreshments were served, no speeches were made, no awards were distributed. The auditorium was hot and cramped, the seats uncomfortable, the film shown on a small screen from a noisy projector.

Still, it was a special evening. The low-budget film,
Siavash
—named after a hero in Ferdowsi’s epic poem,
Book of Kings
—was the first feature film by Saman Moghadam, a promising thirty-year-old screenwriter and director. The censors at the Ministry of Islamic Guidance had not approved the film, and the expectation was that they never would. But the ministry allowed the film to be shown to a select few, just this once. The director and the stars of the film were there to celebrate the special event.

The film deals with a familiar theme: the generation gap between the loyal warriors who sacrificed for the revolution and the war with Iraq, and their children who long for happy lives unburdened by the legacy their fathers left. But this film breaks a number of taboos. The hero of the film, a young composer and musician in a nine-piece rock band, plays the sort of lively music that would not be allowed in a real-life concert. Unlike most young, single Iranians, he lives alone in his own apartment, not with his family. Even more daring, he openly socializes with his girlfriend, a photojournalist who leads an independent life.

The story centers on the musician’s father, who is believed to have been killed sixteen years before in the war with Iraq. The musician’s mother has remarried. Suddenly, they get the news that the father is alive and on his way home. Bearded, haggard, and middle-aged, the father shows up one night at his son’s concert but he doesn’t reveal himself. In an apparent sign of disapproval, he crumples a small photograph of his son and storms out. But in a teary reunion, he comes to his son’s rescue after the son is arrested with his girlfriend in a park. The father’s vocal cords have been destroyed and he cannot speak. So the son does all the talking. “Why did you leave me alone—not for one year, but for sixteen years?” the son asks. “Didn’t you think I needed a father?”

The father picks up a pen to write. “I have bad news,” he writes. “I am not your father . . . I am a friend of your father. Your father was martyred two months before his release in Iraq.” The film never definitively states that the man is the musician’s father. That would be too transparent. But the audience just seems to know that he is.

After the screening, the audience of Tehran’s beautiful people poured out into an enclosed courtyard for congratulations and conversation. I introduced myself to Moghadam, the director, who dared to shake my hand in public. “I tried to show the huge divide between the fervent believers and the tired, young generation of today that wants a normal, peaceful life,” he explained. “The father is just like so many others in society. He comes back from the war and expects to hear people chanting ‘Death to America’ and really believing it. Instead, he hears music that he thinks should be forbidden and sees ads for Coca-Cola. So he thinks his life has been for nothing. And he cannot deal with it. He’s a casualty of the war. But our generation—we’re the casualty of war too. And we have to find a way to deal with it.”

I left the one-room cinema club buoyant. My friend Nargess, by contrast, was enraged. “How phony!” she declared. “On the outside everyone is saying, ‘Oh, what a nice movie. You should win an Oscar.’ Look at that young director. On the outside, he is smiling and looking happy. But inside, he is shivering with fear. We have an expression, ‘Your hands are tied and in the mud.’ That’s his situation. These people are working with no hope. I feel pity for these people, pity for myself.”

I was stunned. I had rarely seen Nargess so angry. I saw the film as a daring effort to expose the generational divide in Iran, play banned music, and explore the complexities of young love. And it was being shown at an officially sanctioned screening in the heart of Tehran! Nargess saw the private screening of the film as just another example of the restrictions of the Islamic Republic.

But Iran is a country of surprises, and the censors eventually approved the release of
Siavash
in Tehran’s cinemas. Another surprise: the reformist daily,
Asr-e Azadegan,
run by Jalaeipour and Shamsolvaezin, panned it. The review acknowledged that the film took on forbidden subjects, but called it naive, trite, and worst of all, boring. The movie drew respectable crowds, but was by no means a smash hit.

I often think that Iranian films, which are about ordinary people leading ordinary lives, are appreciated more in the United States and Europe than in Iran. Many Iranians are too ground down by their own everyday lives to want to spend good money to watch morality tales in a movie theater. So for years, many Iranians I know have preferred to watch American videos or satellite television in the privacy of their homes. That way, outside the stern glare of the Islamic Republic, they can escape, and dream.

Still, the new Iranian cinema is a far cry from the early years of the revolution. In the last year of the Shah’s reign, according to Hamid Naficy, an Iranian-born expert on Iranian movies and television, as many as 180 movie theaters were burned, demolished, or shut down as part of a cultural cleansing by the Shah’s opponents. Ayatollah Khomeini hated the cinema, putting it in the same category as theater, dancing, and sexually integrated swimming.

After Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 his revolutionary regime quickly realized the importance of film, for propaganda if not for entertainment. Movies would have to be Islamic. New rules in 1982 banned films that weakened Islamic principles, showed disturbing scenes of violence, or encouraged wickedness, corruption, and prostitution. Women were to be portrayed as modest and chaste role models, and good mothers who would raise God-fearing children. Eventually, the government produced more than 30 percent of Iranian films, subsidized film and studio facilities, and gave long-term, low-interest loans to many independent filmmakers.

In 1983, early in his decade-long tenure as Minister of Islamic Guidance, Mohammad Khatami urged filmmakers to promote “self-sacrifice, martyrdom, and revolutionary patience.” A few years later he changed his mind. “Cinema is not the mosque,” he said. If leisure time were to become homework, he added, “then we would have a deformed society.” In a speech in the fall of 1997, shortly after he took over as President, Khatami went further. “Our cinema is a vivid and clear reflection of the greatness of our culture, people, and Islamic revolution,” he said.

Eventually, directors found creative ways to deal with the strictures of Islamic filmmaking. Glances of longing replaced touching between a man and a woman. The director Dariush Mehrjui made it seem more natural for his actresses to have their heads covered at home by putting the heroine of his 1990 film
Hamoun
in a bathrobe, a bath towel wrapped around her head, as if she had just emerged from the shower, or by showing a woman doing chores around the house with a scarf holding her hair in place. In his 1996 film
Gabbeh,
Mohsen Makhmalbaf circumvented a ban on female actresses giving birth on the screen by donning a skirt and playing the role himself.

More fascinating than these distortions of reality are the intrusions of reality into film. A number of filmmakers intercut scenes of reality into fictional works, blurring the distinction between fiction and documentary; the technique confounds the censors by adding both authenticity and deniability.

In
The Lady of May,
Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s heroine, Forough, is a forty-two-year-old divorced documentary filmmaker directing a film about the model single mother. As Forough queries real-life Iranian feminists for their definition of the model mother, she struggles to decide whether she can act on her love for a male suitor and still be a good mother to her son. In an interview in the film, Shahla Lahidji, Iran’s most famous real-life female publisher, tells Forough that the model mother “is the woman who blends being a mother with being a human being.”

Forough also seeks out Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Rafsanjani. “In our country, the problem is the law,” Hashemi says. “All the judges are men, and they don’t understand the problems of women.” And Mehrangiz Kar, one of the country’s real-life leading divorce and child custody lawyers, says bluntly, “I don’t know why the model mother has to be chosen in the first place.”

I saw
The Lady of May
only because Bani-Etemad lent me a video copy of the film. It had been made years before and was shown briefly in theaters. But the censors banned it after Bani-Etemad refused to edit out the explicit way it dealt with a woman’s longing—a mother’s longing—for romantic love. So
The Lady of May
sat on the shelf, seen only occasionally by her friends. And then suddenly, and without explanation, the film was released again. Such is the nature of Iranian cinema.