White Meadows

Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

(Iran, 2009)

A New Mythology?

Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadows tells new stories, new myths, at least to the Western world, and these shocking episodes take place in a diaphanous white white world of sea, sand, sky, and islands of craggy rock. This all-pervasive landscape creates a mysterious, ominous, and inescapable dwelling place—ironically a prison—for the ignorant, superstitious, and black-attired islanders, who follow barbaric traditions tied to nature and survival. For instance, rains haven’t come for months, so that on one of the islands a human sacrifice is made to appease the sea, which is angry at the sky and preventing the clouds from raining. This is a salt-world, everything is overly and unbearably salty, shrouded in white, the sea and sky barely distinguishable from one another, the stillness of such monotony as to cause insanity.

In such a primitive, isolated, and confined existence (of infinite boundaries!), human discomfort and suffering lead to superstition and myths. Unanswered for the audience is the looming question: Is this world real? Is there really a circumscribed island-cosmos out there where civilization is at such an embryonic stage that these barbaric acts take place? Yes, to the stoning of a teenage boy, but what about the bridal bier for the most beautiful girl in the Bedouin-like community, who is set adrift in the sea to appease its anger? And what of the handicapped village dwarf on another island, who is sent down a well carrying jangling jars that contain the villagers’ spoken confessions? If he doesn’t deliver the jars to the fairy at the bottom and get back out of the well before the sun rises, then all will be lost. He doesn’t even reach the bottom before the sun comes up, and the village leader cuts the rope to which he’s attached.

Constructed like the Odyssey, The White Meadows follows the slow-motion routine of a central character, a kind of shaman named Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi). His job is to make the rounds of the islands and collect the tears of all the inhabitants in a tiny phial, presumably to relieve their sorrows and in some instances to heal or to create a miracle. His oars on a dilapidated dingy lap the water slowly through the white shroud until an island comes into view. At his first stop—where a beautiful girl has died and needs to be removed from the island, because even as a corpse she tortures the men’s libidos—we hear a cry not unlike that of a seabird: “He is coming!” This heralding of Rahmat’s approach sets the stage for symbols throughout the movie, many of which are never explained. “He is coming!” suggests not only a Messiah in the form of Rahmat, but also conveys humankind’s need for hope in spiritual saviors “who arrive.”

Throughout the rituals performed by each island’s inhabitants, the film unrelentingly reiterates the desolate (and yet ineffably beautiful) landscape, the unarable, barely habitable whiteness dotted with black figures fated to live there. At the climax of each barbaric act against a fellow villager (justified with “congratuations” to those who lose the family member), vocal music breaks out to the skies, intensifying the horrific human act.

A lady’s sandal turns up on the beach and symbolizes why the sea has become saltier, for it matches another shoe stashed in a demented woman’s black bag. Symbols provide answers for everything in the White Meadows universe. Later, when Rahmat makes his last stop on the island of a wealthier client, where greenery and his own motorbike exist, the hostess leaves the room, and we see she is wearing the same sandals that had been matched up earlier. But the riddle, or connection, or miracle, is unexplained. Similarly, Rahmat takes on a castaway teenager who says he wants to find his father who left when he himself was too young to know what he looked like. All he knows is that his father was a shepherd. The boy goes on to be punished for trying to rescue the bride sent adrift to sea. Rahmat is able to cut short the stoning and row away with the boy unconscious in his boat. He comes to another island, where a painter is being tortured by villagers because he saw the sea as red and painted it that way. Rahmat takes the painter away on his boat with the unconscious boy. The islander who sees them off asks, “What’s at the far end of this sea?”—underscoring the perpetual exile of the archipelago’s inhabitants.

Rahmat brings the boy and the painter to yet another island where a wild-looking man lives in a box tower on top of a towering rock, with numerous ladders leading down to the beach (reminiscent of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel). It’s like a watchtower, and indeed, as this vignette unfolds, the wild man with long white hair and scant clothing proves to be the keeper of heavy chains and ropes. Worse, he presides over a sea-grave, where hatlike tins bob on the water—a whole cemetery of hats bobbing. Is this horrible place real or imagined? What are all the stories behind the bobbing markers? Is this a grave for prisoners or islanders in general?

Are the White Meadows’ vignettes new myths featuring a crude though caring character (Rahmat) for their Odysseus? And if so, what is the message in these new myths with their antihero? The cemetery keeper in the Brueghel tower has gone insane from his isolation and begs Rahmat to stay the night. We see the dimly lit tower from the outside and hear the weeping and desperate outpourings of the keeper: “I don’t want to live alone here anymore, I want to go home, I want to go back to my sheep.” Could this be the boy’s shepherd father that he had hoped to find? If so, it’s too late, for during the night the boy has died in his chains on the beach. From the man in the tower, Rahmat has collected a large bottle of tears—no mere phial.

He pushes off to his last destination—a larger, upper-class home with a single painting on the wall and carpets on the floor to indicate its elevation; it’s the home of the woman wearing the matched-up sandals. She wheels in her octogenarian father of lordly status, and Rahmat pours the bottle of tears over his arthritic feet resting in a basin. Then the woman wheels the old man away. Rahmat pours the tears in the basin back into his bottle. In the last scene he empties the bottle into the sea.

Is it symbolic that the sufferings and tears of the poor and primitive islanders are poured over the feet of the rich man who lives in paltry vegetation and comfort compared to the others’ wasteland? As an audience we aren’t helped with the meaning of such actions and we are too foreign from the history and traditions of Iran to make ready connections.

The superlative filming of the vignettes creates gripping suspense, even though the actual atmosphere is deathly still, oppressive in its monotony, and intensified by the rocky island surfaces, hostile to human life. Aguirre, the Wrath of God similarly created tension in its quiet, sinister floating down the river. In White Meadows the atmosphere isn’t sinister but horrifically cruel and justified by hypocrisies. As a new mythology (or is it old?), the film terrifies while attaining cinematic heights; but isn’t this is what famous fairy tales do in both oral and prose form? Inevitably, audiences of The White Meadows will come away wondering how much of these fairy tales is true to contemporary life in a hidden part of the world.

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© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

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