The Seed of the Sacred Fig

As titles go, the latest from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof epitomizes a rare fidelity to its subject. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, quite possibly the director’s pièce de résistance in an oeuvre long conversant with everyday Iranian life and critical of the Islamist regime under which it unfolds, brims with the germs of many ideas and sows them far and wide over a sprawling runtime. There is a sacredness, too, attached to its proceedings: a film incensed by the scales of injustice and insistent on invoking morality against morality’s own weaponization, Rasoulof’s indictment of his country’s theocratic regime comes hot off the heels of a renewed prison sentence from which he narrowly escaped, along with footage from a production clandestinely made and then smuggled across the border. With this in mind, one finds it unbecoming, irresponsible even, to decry the righteousness of its enterprise, which comprises two resolutely intertwined acts: a social cross-section of competing interests and ideological rifts, distilled into the microcosm of a bourgeois family, and a claustrophobic chamber piece, dispatched through a landscape of interrogations, road trips, and unrelenting paranoia.

Righteousness, to be sure, informs both the film’s many character motivations as well as its central stakes. Taking his focus off the wholly dispossessed, as tends to be the prerogative of artists subverting polite censorship, Rasoulof trains it instead on a middle-class environs, where battlegrounds are more hastily drawn and allegiances shiftier. As Iman (Misagh Zare), hitherto a mere lawyer, is appointed as a state investigator — a path to a stable career with the Revolutionary Courts — and assigned a gun, his family life begins to unravel. His wife, the stern but submissive Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), has his best interests at heart when she cautions their teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), about the dangers of malign influences from outside that covet their downfall, and to this end she stresses decorum and propriety, repudiating their wishes to invite friends over, post on social media, or otherwise invite undue scrutiny. When Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), a friend of Rezvan, is badly injured by buckshot at a student protest, she reluctantly treats her wounds in their house, keeping the latter’s presence a secret from Iman.

Meanwhile, Iman — kept out of view for the most of Seed’s first half — is troubled by his job, increasingly so because of the death sentences he’s expected to rubber-stamp for those as young as teenagers, deemed guilty for participation in or association with the protests breaking out in Tehran over the draconian enforcement of Iran’s mandatory hijab law. (Footage from 2022-2023’s Mahsa Amini protests punctuates the social media feeds of Rezvan and Sana, even though no explicit backdrop or reference is provided in the film.) He returns home later and later, burdened by guilt and seemingly disassociated on occasion. During a rare family dinner, he rebuffs Rezvan’s contempt for the government, alleging his expertise having served in it for two decades. “You don’t,” she replies. “Because you’re on the inside.” The very next morning, Iman wakes up to find his gun missing and, with the threat of a three-year jail term hanging over him, enjoins the film to shift its gears into a full-blown thriller where conspiracy and allegory suffuse all but a few moments of respite.

Where conspiracy muddies the waters, allegory redirects its flow, and the result of their conjoining is a potent outpouring of propulsive anger that endorses symbolism and encodes its signifiers in searing proportions against tyranny. Except where suspense traditionally paves the way for clarification, it’s less judicious with its output here, and Seed suffers as a consequence of cheap and incoherent moralism. From the get-go, organized religion and its intolerance for dissent are identified as the moral enemy, and it’s likely to them that the titular fig refers to: a plant, as noted in the opening credits, whose seeds “fall on other trees” and sprout into branches that “wrap around the host tree and strangle it.” But just as likely as the totality of religion is the inevitability of revolution, hallowed by its very moral necessity. The painful dilemmas afflicting Iman’s family are mysteriously bifurcated into camps under which each member comfortably settles; excepting Najmeh, whose concern for their cohesion remains paramount, the antagonism between father and daughters bespeaks conventional gender and generational divides. Both become easy shorthands for the patriarch and his oppressed subjects respectively, and both belie the film’s cartoonish amassing of righteous sympathy.

Rasoulof’s previous film, There Is No Evil, examined the violence of the death penalty through four connected tales of its victims, and while Seed dispenses with the anthological conceit altogether, its penchant for convenient didacticism remains. By the film’s third act, all intrigues from its intimate premise are jettisoned to make way for a nakedly unhinged man at war with his immodest captives. This battle between theocracy and secularism — also cast as one between misogyny and feminism — capitalizes on personal madness and grafts it onto political disarray, the same way it situates a parable of reactionary stirrings against regime violence within the workings of individual agency amid domestic tensions. But such an equivocation proves suspect because of its lack of narrative credibility. As motivation quickly plays second fiddle to metaphor and melodrama, it short-circuits much of its plausibility in a showdown spiritually reminiscent of older Westerns. Currency, however, demands a more immediate template, thus precipitating a lazy whodunnit. One could conceivably imagine the gun’s disappearance as divinely ordained, and were it so, Iman’s actions — whether retaliatory or redemptive — would be more plausible and consequently carry more weight. The film’s ultimate resolution, however, forecloses miraculous intervention even as it insists, perhaps ingenuously, on the triumph of freedom over tyranny. And thus, in its urgent virtuous crusade, and despite it being touted at Cannes to win the Palme, The Seed of the Sacred Fig falters as overzealous activism. Chekhov’s gun is fired, but its bullets ring hollow. — MORRIS YANG

Shambhala

In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed (not the senile Facebook shitposter) makes an illuminating connection and crucial distinction between what he defines as transcendental cinema and what’s recognized as slow cinema. The long take — still, static, sterile — is the Bible for both cinematic styles. The difference lies in their respective interpretations of it. Take, for instance, the “pillow shots” in Yasujirō Ozu’s films: these three-to-four-second-long shots of “life as it is” are digressive by design; the cuts to them from the character drama are unmotivated by filmic action. Schrader believes lingering on these “unnecessary” shots, even for mere seconds, generates an “emotional or intellectual or spiritual effect” that slow cinema, with its insistence on extending this “dead time” to three or four minutes, does not. It almost asks too much from the audience — it wants them to engage with the duration of the image to create an emotional, intellectual, or spiritual effect. When it’s an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, you’re up for the challenge because the images themselves are mysterious. (The still and sturdy camera is oddly more receptive to sights and sounds of, if nothing else, the spiritual realm.) But when the images and subsequent drama become still and sterile, you begin to wish the film’s existence would remain a mystery. Sadly, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala, the first Nepalese film to premier at major international festivals like Berlinale and Locarno this year, is that type of film. It wants to achieve transcendence through its slow cinema aesthetics, but it’s too conventionally narrativized to do so.

The first 45 minutes suggest otherwise. Here, its contemplative style — this is a film composed entirely of static long takes that either languorously pan-and-scan the simultaneously stark and splendid Himalayan vistas or, in lucky moments, gradually push into its actors’ subtly expressive faces to provide a glimpse of what they’re feeling — complements its largely plotless content. This makes its extended setup feel more like an overly patient but perceptive anthropological documentary about a Nepalese woman, Pema (Thinley Lhamo), engaged in a polyandrous marriage with three brothers, in which she plays a loving wife to the first brother, Tashi (Tenzin Dalha), a spiritual guide to the second one, Karma (Sonam Topden), and a mother to the third one, Dawa (Karma Wangyal Gurung). But Bham and co-writer Abinash Bikram Shah de-dramatize the potentially explosive family drama: Pema is not overtly portrayed as a victim of a traditionally patriarchal system; she’s, like every woman in the village, content on playing her role as homemaker to all three men. So, the camera spends considerable time simply observing her cooking meals for everyone, singing with Karma, encouraging Dawa to do his schoolwork, and helping Tashi with his trade. This “time spent” — preparing, accommodating, loving — is, essentially, “dead time.” But the film’s patient, slow style is essential here, for it honors the time spent by Pema to accomplish these tasks by showing them in their entirety.

Had Shambhala gone beyond mere observation to piece-by-piece pick apart the hypocrisies underpinning the traditional mindset of the Nepalese village people who allow a woman to have three husbands but ostracize her for having multiple lovers, the filmmaking style would hold some value. The problem is that it merely gestures toward it in several scenes that set up the film’s central conflict. The amiable relationship between a teacher, Ram (Karma Shakya), and Pema sparks rumors around the village that the two of them are having an affair. This news spreads like a raging wildfire, reaching Tashi, who, after hearing it, vanishes without a trace on his way back to the village from the trading route to Lhasa. But Bham shoots this potentially overdramatic sequence like he shoots Pema doing her work: calmly. His long takes encourage us not only to be with the character, but also to look closer at the other side of the Himalayan setting’s serenity: its deafening silence. They’re two sides of the same coin, and the inability to separate the silence that liberates from the silence that imprisons is the contemplative heart of the film.

Rather than allowing us to come to this conclusion naturally, though, Shambhala becomes, for the remaining 100 minutes of its exhaustingly long 150-minute runtime, a frustratingly tiresome and predictable experience, replete with all sorts of clichéd life lessons about self-liberation you can find in readily digestible “exotic” trash like Eat, Pray, Love. Why does this need to be shot like a slow film though? What’s the value of lingering on a wide shot of our characters stranded in the middle of the Himalayan Mountain range when the characters themselves will clarify their meaning? Shouldn’t we get conventional shot-reverse-shot editing to better emphasize how Pema and Karma increasingly get close to each other through their various hijinks on their trek to find their brother? This, and another million questions about film form, intrude into one’s mind during the film’s second half, as viewers are asked to try their best to prevent its “dead time” from becoming wasted time. — DHRUV GOYAL

Collective Monologue

Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination with anatomy is obvious from Nulepsy, one of her earliest shorts focused on the titular condition which describes the fictional “pathological need to be nude.” In Expression of the Sightless, a blind man explores a 19th-century sculpture with his hands, the camera only ever focused on the part of the figures where his hands are placed. Elsewhere, and featured more prevalently in her oeuvre, is the relationship between humans and nature. Adeline for Leaves explored the dynamics between a botanical prodigy and her departed mentor, from whom she learned about the “deep time” of plants and the environmental philosophy of gardens. More recently, in Black Pond, Rinland turned her attention to the animal kingdom. Collective Monologue features prominently each of these themes — the corporeal, the environmental, and the wild.

The film follows various workers at zoos and animal sanctuaries in Argentina, collecting histories of these institutions, and the laborers and animals that form their foundations. The relationship between worker and animal is formed between bars, but is nonetheless portrayed sympathetically and with a tenderness for both parties. Hands, both human and animal, grasp onto each other with such profound intimacy that the interspecies dynamic of the pairs could be all but forgotten if not for the literal barriers that separate them. Rinland’s camera is just as fascinated by the workers as it is the animals. For every moment that lingers on the textures of a tortoise shell or flash of pink feathers from the flamingos, there is a pause to gaze at a worker cleaning the habitats or repairing deteriorated facades — shot with just as much care, and with as much respect for their individual movements and momentums. The nature of the film is liberatory, and its sight is set on a more equitable world for both the laborers and occupants of these institutions. Though the cells never seem so uncaring as those of prisons, the flight the liberated animals take once in the wild seems to suggest that the captivity imposed on them was no less stifling.

The film ends addressing the question of the titular Collective Monologue, which comes from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget: “a period of egocentrism in a child’s life where they see the point of view of the listener as irrelevant. They believe that nature is created for them, and that they can control it.” The metaphor is blunt, but no less effective for its obviousness. Rinland’s films are typically narrated in such a way as to “educate” the viewer — here, the purpose of the given exposition feels more evocative. Where much of her previous work elucidates specific phenomena that exists within the dichotomy between man and nature, Collective Monologue lingers on a more intimate and unassuming look into the tangled web of contradictions that make up the relationship between humanity and the world it inhabits. — JOSHUA PEINADO

New Dawn Fades

Madness is the cross to bear for majesty, or so the sentiment goes; insofar as one seeks absolution from mediocrity, one finds it in a state not dissimilar to dim, incommunicable transcendence. This correlation between absolute distinction and manic divinity may, however, work in the opposite direction as well: just as delusions feed off of grandeur, grandeur is sustained by delusion’s need to justify itself. Akın (Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu), the protagonist of Gürcan Keltek’s dazzling and radical New Dawn Fades, has an affliction of the mind, but it is his body that wanders, first through worldly intimacy and then into spiritual conspiracy. His journey, stretching over the film’s 130-minute runtime, is fractured, amorphous, and undulating, a cacophony of interactions and visages laid over the byzantine topography of the city of Istanbul. Keltek’s first foray into fiction, after the docu-features Colony and Meteors, is both a portrait and landscape; conjuring the mind’s solipsistic act in tension with the broader visions it brings forth, New Dawn Fades straddles the delicate boundaries between detail and depth, mind and matter, city and man.

Psychogeography — the effect of lived spaces on living experiences — underlines much of Keltek’s film, although it’s arguably less crucial to its central narrative than the singular exploration of a psyche gone rogue and possibly reformed. The camera is tethered in nearly all sequences to Akın, studying his movements and expressions. He wears a face of serenity, biking and walking through the streets of Istanbul with little aim; perhaps he sees something we don’t. An oblique screenplay hints at an unspecified mental illness, accompanied by drugs for treatment, but Akın’s narcosis throughout, as he reconnects with old friends (one a fellow patient, another possibly an old flame) and evades his frightened mother, appears to have a sinister and outside influence. “The only thing that remains from a loss is a trace,” echoes a mantra late in the film, portending less the vagaries of literary deconstruction than it does Akın very literally losing his grip on reality. His condition, in this regard, resembles those of the protagonists of Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Carlos Reygadas in their perpetual search for higher meaning; but higher meaning is rendered tangible, if not perceptible, in Keltek’s swerve into a phantasmagoria of demonic and divine.

This introduction of overt mythology would derail a lesser film, but applied thus it provides a conceptual toolkit — if not a merely phenomenological substrate — with which Keltek refracts his many manifestations of troubled psychosis. Like the narrator of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Akın faces a world of psychoactive sensations, and their dysfunctional strata probe deep — beyond explicit political commentary, as might’ve been the case with Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu — into the recesses of a mind torn between this world and the next. Even this spiritual gnosis, however, shouldn’t be taken as the film’s literal reading: though Chalcedon and the cult of Mithras are evoked, New Dawn Fades works best not so much as a simple exploration of psychological interiority, but as an attempt to exorcize this interiority through pure, unadulterated fantasy. The film is radical in its uncompromising stance; its title takes from a Joy Division song, but what lingers, after a voyage through time that feels as much a few days long as it does a few years, is the crepuscular image of an awakening prematurely snuffed out. Scored to the vividly spectral tunes of British artist Son of Philip (which may be properly labeled “psychomusical”), New Dawn Fades begins under the hallowed dome of the Hagia Sophia and concludes with a sunset on the Bosphorus — both visions of the sublime, and the madman’s highest fear and joy. — MORRIS YANG

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

In her previous film Wet Sand, Georgian director Elene Naveriani depicted a clash between the urbane, laid-back values of Tbilisi and the small-minded cruelty of village life. It’s a topic that seems to carry personal weight for the filmmaker since, in essence, she has explored this problem again in her latest film, Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry. However, where Wet Sand was retrospective, filling in the contours of a life that was never fully lived, BBB is about the present-day reverberations of familial trauma, and how a mean-spirited, disapproving community can weaponize a person’s unhappiness… —MICHAEL SICINSKI   [Read the full previously published review.]