Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories

Sina Razani

I feel that Shahram Mokri's Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is one of the more impressive feature film debuts of the 21st century. This 2008 release has had very little imprint in the US. It even lacks a Wikipedia page. The picture's IMDB page incorrectly lists it as a color film. It was shot digitally and then rendered into black and white with a few splashes of red. It is a discursive mystery with absurdist humor. The look of the picture matches the tone of the film which seeks to move beyond the then prevailing neorealism of Iranian cinema. The deadpan absurdist tone and manner of Ashkan was influenced, as Mokri has acknowledged, by the films of Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. He has also cited the influence of Quentin Tarantino on Ashkan's script which, like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, plays with time and points of view.

The film leaps about, focusing on a myriad of strange characters whose tales intersect including two blind jewel thieves, two medical students trying to deal with a room full of cadavers, a representative of the police, and a winged sculpture. The titular Ashkan doesn't show up until halfway through the flick. That he is seeing his therapist denotes how Western the film is. Islamic fundamentalism is significant in its absence. The film has a hard bop soundtrack courtesy of Abuzar Saffarian and employs what sounds like a Farsi version of The Windmills of Your Mind for the conclusion. Ashkan is seeing his therapist after his fourteenth suicide attempt. His doc, understandably, terminates their professional relationship. Such is the warped and askew humor that permeates this film. Unlike some absurdist comedies, there are actual laughs that prevent the film from falling prey to artiness.

Ashkan is off-putting in its preposterousness and ramshackle in its production, but I could be describing Breathless. Ashkan is so efficiently shot and cut that its polyphonic saga whizzes by. My mouth was often agape at its visual simplicity and audacity. Unlike some adepts of post-modern clutter, Mokri injects enough heart along with the cleverness to engage the viewer emotionally. Like Godard, he is a devoted cinephile and that permeates his work. Mokri was initiated into the mysteries of the cinema by his father in a country where it sometimes dangerous to pursue that passion. As a lad, Mokri had his head shaved by the local authorities for possessing a VHS copy of a ninja movie. A long dialogue about Melville's Le Samouraï provides a bonding mechanism for two hoods and a way to invoke Mokri's father's favorite actor, Alain Delon. The cast of Ashkan, almost all of them theatrical veterans, enliven the film with arcane riffs and expert beats.

Fish and Cat

Ashkan, The Charmed Ring and other stories is part of a new box set by Deaf Crocodile entitled The Time-Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri. It incudes his three subsequent features: Fish & Cat, Invasion, and Careless Crime. Biff assures you all that this is one boffo box. Fish and Cat, from 2013, is a serial killer film that ignores the dictates of the genre. There is little gore and the killings around a vacation lake occur offscreen. Instead of an 85 minute quickie it is a discursive and circuitous 2 hours and 14 minutes. Time and perspective are played with as long tracking shots follow the twenty or so characters; mostly hip young students from Tehran. A difficult, but rewardingly immersive picture. The same could be said for Mokri's next feature, Invasion, a Sci-Fi picture of sorts with a vampiric alien feasting on humans. Earth, or at least Iran, is enveloped in darkness and smoke in this 2017 release.The compulsive and repetitive drama is enclosed, occurring almost entirely within a large building that is part college structure, part industrial maze. Invasion functions as a comment on the interiority of gaming. Once again the film is an endless series of tracking shots. As in Fish & Cat, the narrative loop becomes a Möbius strip. To further obfuscate, the characters are played interchangeably by the players. While this jibes with Mokri's absurdism, it also harkens back to Persian ritual dramas known as ta'ziyeh, which Mokri invokes at various points. There is an air of theatrical frivolity that contrasts with the dystopian plot. Invasion will reward multiple viewings.

Careless Crime was released in 2020. The schisms of Iranian life that were undercurrents in the previous films come to the fore as bumbling fundamentalists plot to torch a movie theater. Once again time and perspective shift continually. The action shifts from 2020 to 1979 and back. Yet, the song remains the same as the past is prologue to the future. There are films within the film within the film. Sometimes the satire is half baked, as in the fake feature within Careless Crime, but the cinephilia of the picture won me over. We visit a movie museum and even view an Edison short. Careless Crime is Mokri"s most conventional and mature work and bodes well for Black Rabbit, White Rabbit.

Tuner

Havana Rose Liu and Leo Woodall

Daniel Rohrer's Tuner is a promising first fictional feature. It attempts to affix a crime subplot to a romantic comedy with mixed results. Leo Woodall stars as Niki, a piano tuner apprenticing for an aged mentor named Harry Horowitz, played by an indulged Dustin Hoffman. The duo putter around the tri-state area in a bespoke van servicing the underused pianos of the rich and indolent. Niki is afflicted with an "audio allergy" which enable him to hear pitch perfectly, but also makes him painfully sensitive to ambient noise. He meets cute with a budding composer named Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) and after initial misgivings they are canoodling in a musical montage set to Dean Martin's version of Almost Like Being in Love. The film's action is mostly set to jazz standards from 1950s by such luminaries as Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Charles Mingus. Complications arise when tragedy strikes and Niki is forced to earn major scratch by applying his specialized skills to safecracking for a motley crew of Russian gangsters.

It is here that the flick goes off the rails a bit. The portrayal of the Russians is cartoonish (surprising for the director of Navalny) so that when they bare their fangs, the results are not believable. However, this is primarily a genre exercise, so implausibilities abound; as many as in, say, Golden Boy. The film is able to coast along on the charm of the performers. Ms. Liu makes her character enough of a control freak to be believable and Woodall plays interestingly against the heroic mien of a character with a disability. Best in show is Tovah Feldshuh as Harry's no nonsense spouse. Jean Reno is somewhat miscast as a maestro, but it is always a pleasure to see him. Rohrer directs with a pleasing attention to dramatic convention, tempo, and characterization, but, hopefully, his next script will be less derivative.                            

Ghare Baire

Soumitra Chatterjee and Swatilekha Sengupta

Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) is a historical film foregrounded by a love triangle. This film released in 1984 is based on the 1916 novel of the same title by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore also wrote song lyrics and some of these songs find their way into this film adaptation. Both book and film center on Nikhil (Victor Banerjee), a Bengali noble and his wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Sengupta). Nikhil is Western and progressive leaning, for 1907 and his wife follows suit. Their relative domestic bliss is ruptured when nationalist leader and longtime friend, Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives to visit. Sandip is a charismatic speaker and ladies man who is agitating against British rule. Nikhil doesn't want Bimala to live a cloistered life and practically serves her to Sandip on a plate. She responds to his charms and events lead to a tragic ending.

The novel expresses Tagore's ambivalent attitude towards India's emerging nationalism. As pointed out by Andrew Robinson in his Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, still the best book in English on Ray, the character of Nikhil articulates Tagore's qualms concerning Hindu ethnocentrism. In 1905, Lord Curzon had divided Bengal into Hindu and Muslim sections; the latter corresponding roughly to the present state of Bangladesh. This was a portent of the eventual partitioning of India in 1947, at which time Ray first wrote a screenplay adaptation of the novel. Sandip is shown exploiting this issue and stoking ethnic violence by calling for a ban on foreign trade, a measure which would hurt poor Muslim merchants the most. Nikhil sees Sandip for what he is politically and as an exploiter of women, for Bimala is merely a link on his chain of fools. Nikhil's apparent diffidence is a problem dramatically, but Ray, serene in his dotage, captures his peculiar aura of resigned fatalism. Ghare Baire is a studiously conducted chamber play in a languorous mansion full of wonders and wondrous kitsch. We do see scenes of the world outside Nikhil's mansion, but sparingly.

The deliberate pacing of the film and its political background may make this a hard film to get into. It reminds me of late Visconti in its decorous lassitude. What gave me an insight that opened up the film for me was Ray's direction of Gopa Aich, a neophyte cast as Nikhil's widowed sister-in-law. She wears white to denote her widowhood, a portent.The role is ridiculous. The woman is bored and not too subtly enamored with Nikhil. Ray directs the actress broadly, as if she were a diva in a comic opera. The film uses music throughout with songs in both Bengali and English. Ray shoots this chamber play as if it were an opera, again akin to Visconti. There are duos and trios and the usual tra-la-la triangle. The three leads make their characters sing. Ray had a heart attack while filming, his place was taken by his son, Sandip, who followed his father's instructions. This circumstance has led to Ghare Baire being treated as a lesser effort in the Ray canon, but I found it to be a fully integrated masterpiece.

Ghare Baire has just been released on disc by Criterion as part of its Eclipse series in a set entitled Late Ray. The other two films in the set are two other late Ray entries, An Enemy of the People and The Stranger. An Enemy of the People is dull and tired, an overly earnest and static attempt to transpose Ibsen's play to 1989 India. Why Ray tacked on a Frank Capra style ending onto the material is beyond me. The bedraggled Steve McQueen version is more interesting. Ray's final film, The Stranger, shares many of the same players as An Enemy of the People, but is a appreciably livelier film. There is color, song, dance, and even a few exterior scenes. Ray's screenplay is reminiscent of Ghare Baire: an interloper temporarily upsets an established domestic balance. In this case, the stranger of the title is a long lost uncle of dubious provenance. The intrigue is slim, but The Stranger has its modest charms.