If
this is how street vendors are abused for lacking a proper license, just imagine
the beatings meted out by the Basij morality police. Ghasem might be a thug,
but he has his limits. Frankly, he would rather take a bribe than make an
arrest. Unfortunately, that is why his short-term contract as an officer of the
municipal street vendor auxiliary will not be renewed. Ghasem thinks he has a
better deal percolating, but life will rudely gum up the works in Mohsen Gharaie’s
searing Blockage (trailer here), which screens
during this year’s UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.
Just
when Ghasem thought his schemes were coming to fruition, his life turns to ash.
He has taken his wife’s inheritance to pay the down payment on a truck he hopes
to use to collect recyclables and possibly also rent out. However, she was
dead-set on using that money to buy a flat of their own. She is so disappointed,
she intends to abort their long-awaited baby, out of sheer disgust with his
genes. Right, they do not dork around with half-measures in Iranian films.
Regrettably,
Ghasem is having trouble concentrating on the home front, because one of the
vendors he recently bashed has filed charges. To get him to withdraw the
complaint, Ghasem will have to help the desperate older man recover his iPhone,
if it really is his iPhone. Everything gets even sketchier during the course of
this errand.
Although
not a crime film per se, Blockage shares
the sinister fatalism and grueling one-darned-thing-after-another pace of a
movie like A Simple Plan. Ghasem is
an utter cad, who makes every bad decision available to him and even perversely
invents new ones, yet we cannot look away. Frankly, it is impossible to say
whether we are rooting for or against him, but each new low he hits is
spectacular in its own way.
Hamed
Behdad gives a bracing tour-de-force performance as Ghasem, the desperate
uber-user. Watching him spin out of control is quite a sight to behold, but he
makes each and every step in his downfall painfully believable to watch.
Conversely, Baran Kosrari witheringly undermines his authority and indicts his
egocentric corruption as his exasperated wife Nargess. Mohsen Kiaie helps
anchor the film, standing somewhere between them as Ghasem’s somewhat less corrupt
and more responsible partner Mehdi.
Blockage is an exhausting
film, because Gharaie maintains such a high level of tension, amid a
scrupulously realistic, street-level setting. Watching it is like the
experience of viewing Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly for the first time. It offers a profoundly pessimistic view of human
nature, but it is just a terrific film. Very highly recommended, Blockage screens this Friday (4/11) at
the Billy Wilder Theater, as part of the UCLA Celebration of Iranian Cinema.
