Dir.
Babak Payami, 2003, Iran, 95 mins, subtitles
Cast: Maryam Moghaddam, Kamal Naroui
The day Payami's third film screens, news is released that shooting on Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Amnesia has been prevented by the country's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
The irony is not lost. Negatives for Payami's latest film were confiscated in 2003 by the Iranian authorities and his film also banned. The print shown on this occasion is from the digital original, which the director had been able to keep.
The film's opening scene is excruciatingly slow. An executioner (Naroui), his face masked by the scarf wound tightly around his face, fires intermittent shots from his rifle: off-camera we hear the dull thud of falling bodies. There's a terrible patience to his killings: inbetween shots he drinks tea while an occasional bullock cart passes behind him, loaded with a corpse.
When he raises his rifle for a third shot his hand is stayed. The criminal - also off-camera - is a virgin (Moghaddam). If she dies she will go straight to paradise - so the executioner's leader, Haji, orders him to first marry the girl, then sleep with her, then kill her.
As the executioner goes to question his leader the camera travels across the dusty panorama, and comes to rest on the virgin. She waits, utterly terrified, against the firing wall. While the opening scene has been played out in real-time, lingering on the smallest details enough to test the viewer's patience, it suddenly becomes clear that the girl has been standing against the wall and waiting to die during the whole scene. Payami's film-making is brutal and slow, and these two attributes mark his follow-up to 2001's Secret Ballot.
The rest of the film documents the consequences of the executioner's new doubts - the 'silence between two thoughts' of the title, a silence in which people begin to question dogmas which they'd always taken for granted. At its end the film comes to a circular conclusion, with the virgin once more by the firing wall, this time waiting the outcome of the executioner's fate.
It's clear why the authorities may have taken umbrage at Payami's film, yet it isn't a criticism of Islamic extremism, nor a suggestion that people should necessarily question their faith. This film is about the ways in which religion can be abused, and how leaders have often used religious beliefs to control and make believers captive: "It happened during the Middle Ages," Payami says, "we saw it during the Taliban, we even saw it in Waco, Texas. It's as old as humanity itself".
When the executioner removes his headscarf in the taut opening scene, he slowly regains some semblance of humanity. More than that, he becomes accountable. He is no longer a pawn, blindly carrying out his orders without reflection. He loses the easy anonymity of the rifle, and must make his own body and mind the means of killing, a choice which brings a new understanding.
Once the original digital print is cleaned up, the cinematography will be a compelling part of this tragic tale. So too the film team's painstaking efforts in making the beautiful sand buildings by hand. Performances are basic but credible. Payami made much use of local advice and local talent - which in turn give the film a realistic, documentary feel.
The type-cast characters are at odds with that realism: the virgin, the executioner, the muezzin (prayer caller). They reflect Payami's themes, from religion's oppression to the sexual domination at the heart of nearly all major faiths, where women are criminals simply by the accident of gender. Given such elemental themes this is a film that can speak to viewers despite cultural or religious dissimilarities, and if there's a barrier it's in the painfully slow pace of the editing.
Ruth Bushi
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