The name most likely to catch the attention of cinephiles in the credits of Shahab Fotouhi’s first feature Boomerang is co-editor Aleksandre Koberidze, who broke out in 2021 with his film What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? The two films both begin with a charming chance encounter, in the case of Boomerang between two teenagers. We spend several minutes with the pair before they speak, a rigorous/shot reverse shot showing them at opposite ends of a crosswalk, clearly smitten. After the film’s title card, we see them get to know each other in a manner recalling Before Sunrise as they talk around each other and the possibilities of the future. Their banter more resembles that of an old couple than a first date, and when we leave the two teenagers, a scene of an older couple sharing a quiet lunch that gives way to a fight is a stark interruption. Fortunately, unlike the years Celine and Jesse spend apart in Linklater’s trilogy and the curse placed on the couple in Koberidze’s film, this interruption is only a construction of editing.
After a bit, we see that this second couple are in fact the parents of Minoo, the girl whom the film begins with. Her budding relationship provides interludes from her parents’ marital strife, as their fight leads her father, Behzad, to seek out an old flame. Much like the initial conversation between Minoo and Keyvan, sharp editing leaves out vital information. When Behzad confides in his wife, Sima, she asks if anything physically happened between them, and it’s unclear if he’s being truthful when he says no. The film’s obfuscation seeps into its characters as well: early in the film, Behzad and Sima attend a meeting at Minoo’s school in which her teacher plays anonymized clips of her students discussing their lives. Behzad later confronts Minoo, certain he could make out her edited voice saying there was something she was too embarrassed to tell her parents. Though initially Minoo simply refuses to answer, after her father continues to pry she claims it was in fact one of her friends he heard.
Much of Boomerang consists of conversations between two people, and the precision of Fotouhi’s framing and blocking provides a nice contrast with the haziness of the relationships between his characters. This builds to a climax in which, without the traces of magical realism employed Koberidze’s film, Fotouhi creates a mysterious fracture in the lives of his characters. An even better point of comparison than Koberidze or Linklater, then, might be the late films of Abbas Kiarostami. There’s the clear depiction of a generational gap, though, as through the film’s final moments Minoo and Keyvan seem immune to its disorientation. It’s a moving deference to youth, as well as a compelling subversion of arthouse tropes. Much like Koberidze did a few years ago, Fotouhi boldly announces himself as a voice to watch.