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.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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