Featured at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran, January
18-29, Museum of Fine Arts, http://www.mfa.org
Dragons are from legends, from myths, from superstition, and
in Mani Haghighi’s new film the title sets the stage for the story we will try
to follow as challenged art-film enthusiasts. The plot—a concoction of genres—requires
utter attention to the dialogue, which comes to us in speedy subtitles that
flash unfamiliar names like Babak Hafizi, Behnam Shokouhi, Keyvan Haddad, Saeed
Jahangiri, and Shahrzad Besharat. The names flash as either first or last names
depending on the scene, so it’s difficult to remember who is who. The plot
unravels via the dialogue, some of it reportage in a faux documentary style,
with the director Haghighi being interviewed about how he discovered the story and
made the movie. The film’s opening credits poke fun at the currently popular
trend of “Based on a true story.” Those who thrive on mind-bender plots like Inception will be thrilled to take on
this movie.
Qualities in Dragon
mirror qualities in other Iranian films of a mythical character, White Meadows (Rasoulof 2009) coming to
mind, though in Dragon the
contemporary world integrates thoroughly with the primitive, superstitious,
cult-following villagers on the island of Qeshm, where political exiles are
sent. The three protagonists from Tehran—Babak, Keyvan, and Behnam—who investigate
the island’s haunted cemetery prone to geologically impossible earthquakes,
dress in Western garb in contrast to the turbaned, scarved, robed villagers.
Charaki, the island’s government agent originally from Tehran, dresses like
Babak in a tie and Homburg hat. But he’s lived so long among the villagers that
he keeps their secrets from the regime. Suits and Homburgs on the island’s barren
landscape of tawny, cavernous mountains clash with the primitive environment,
but they also symbolize the vast chasm between the modern world and the
island’s tribal rituals, superstition, and magic.
The movie’s predominant plot conundrum needles the mind to work
out its puzzle, which is more difficult for non-Iranian audiences because of
nods to cultural traditions and the Farsi language translated in fleeting
subtitles. In fact, the plot is simple, linear, straightforward, but it’s
ingeniously woven into politics, hallucinations, unrealities, flashbacks and
flash forwards, changing genres, and an overarching atmosphere of a fantasy quest
not unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And that legend or fairy tale quality—mixed with eerie horror motifs and evil
characters (Charaki and Almas)—creates suspense. The haunted cemetery in the
nowhere land of ghostly mountains, dominated by a fantastical shipwreck littered
with vestiges of former dwellers, transports us to the imaginary realm where
bizarre phenomena occur.
The modern world intrudes to solve a crime: a young political
prisoner (Samei) hanging from the rafters of the shipwreck only days before his
release. Charaki tells Babak, sent by the intelligence agency to investigate, that
it was a suicide, but Babak can see from the neck wounds that it was a murder. He
tells Charaki he’ll spend the night in the shipwreck to read the dead prisoner’s
books and scrawled gibberish on the walls. He also insists that the body be
buried in the cemetery just outside the ship, despite Charaki’s warning that
any body buried there causes an earthquake. The place is considered haunted and
villagers won’t go near it. No one has been buried there for one hundred years.
Babak asserts he isn’t afraid and orders the body to buried. As the night descends
over the deserted, horribly eerie shipwreck, Babak settles on his cot to read
and moments later an earthquake shatters the walls above his head.
Babak returns to Tehran to enlist the help of two experts—geologist
Benham and sound engineer Keyvan—to solve the earthquake mystery. These two specialists
first want assurance that Babak is not working for the intelligence agency.
Here, with the subtitles telling the whole story in a shifting, patchwork way, audiences
may lose the thread of who Babak, and his boss Saeed Jahanjiri, really are, for
on the surface they appear as agents of the secret police. But dialogue and documentary
reportage tell us they are actually members of a counterintelligence group
known as Hozvaresh, led by Jahanjiri. Babak, Jahanjiri, and their cohorts use
an arcane writing system to pass secrets to all of the country’s opposition organizations,
whether communist, nationalist, or factional Islamic groups.
The plot further entangles itself through its documentary genre.
The film’s director, Mani Haghighi, tells his interviewer how he first found
out about the cemetery story through the contents of a metal box that showed up
in his grandfather’s closet. We then watch black-and-white footage from his
grandfather Ebrahim Golestan’s movie, Brick
and the Mirror, which shows Keyvan working as sound engineer. Haghighi
tells us that Keyvan disappeared during the shoot in 1964. It is the myriad
plot detours like this—executed through shifting voices under interrogation, documentary
interviews, live action, and mystery tapes turning up—that the simplicity of
the plot becomes obscured. At the same time, it is all these clever
accoutrements and genre layering that make the movie compelling.
No dragon ever arrives—the one supposedly living under the
cemetery and causing the quakes. But a camel appears twice and symbolizes Babak’s
hallucinogenic clairvoyance related to the disappearance of the murdered
prisoner’s lover, Halimeh. In both cases, Babak’s encounter with the vision of a
camel (who represents Halimeh’s mother) leads to the rescue of Halimeh’s infant
daughter Valileh, who then appears twenty years later in the documentary part
of the movie, adding a fresh piece of evidence to the story—the last puzzle
piece. At the end of the movie, when music clashes and clangs loudly like the
primitive village colliding with modern Tehran, we hear the baying of a camel
mixed in. His voice was part of bringing truth to the fore.
The Dragon’s plot
can only be understood through words, but the film’s visual aura, its fantastical,
spooky setting and atmosphere keep us mesmerized: the Arabian Nights interior of the shipwreck—lit by a thousand candles—the
crackling campfires in the cemetery at night, the tribal rituals with a skinned
goat, the ghost-story music permeated with evil, and the supernatural noises
and occurrences that mix with hallucinogenic experiences. Although films should
be understood through their visual content, and Dragon cannot be understood without its language, the movie is a
grand visual work of masterly filmmaking.
Cast: Amir Jadidi
as Babak Hafizi, Ehsan Goudarzi as Keyvan Haddad, Homayoun Ghanizadeh as Behnam
Shokouhi, Kiana Tajammol as Shahrzad Besharat, Ali Bagheri as Charaki, and as
Kamran Safamanesh as Saeed Jahangiri
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