Even
in Iran, you can find sketchy backwoods types out in the provinces. In one
true-life incident, a provincial restaurant actually served up human flesh.
That is what you call rustic. It is also easy to see how this sensationalistic
episode could easily be adapted for the big screen. However, Shahram Mokri
takes his lurid inspiration in a cerebral art-house direction with the marathon
one-take, circular narrative, Fish &
Cat (trailer
here), which
screens during this year’s New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Film
Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.
There
seems to be a lot of offal and detritus littered about Babak and Saeed’s greasy
spoon. They also act highly suspicious when a carload of college students stops
for directions. Deciding there are “too many of them,” they send the kite
festival goers on their way. Instead, they start hassling Kambiz (another
festival entrant) and his emotionally stunted father. For all viewers know,
they eventually kill the old man. Kambiz just leaves him there and he is one of
the few characters Mokri never revisits.
Making
his way to the campsite, Kambiz starts interacting with other students
participating in the festival. Mokri will move from one character to another Slacker-style, periodically doubling
back to an early to an episode or conversation we have already seen, but
showing it from a different perspective—all within the same continuous tracking
shot. In addition to the intersecting narrative, Mokri also plays games with
characters’ interior monologues that often obscure as much as they illuminate.
Yet,
F&C is an oddly tense film, ever
mindful of its macabre elements. Mokri deliberately plays on the sense some
serious slasher business is always about to erupt, particularly during the nerve-wracking
sequence in which Babak lures one of the young women into the woods on a
dubious pretext. There is no question F&C
is a highly accomplished work. Mokri just pushes his luck, taking one too
many spins around the narrative track. The film clocks in at one hundred
thirty-four minutes, but it really should have been twenty minutes shorter.
Frankly, some of the characters Mokri introduces right before the final “pay-off”
are not nearly as compelling as those we have been following since the first
and second acts (roughly speaking). The unbroken chain of crisscrossing
narratives also just gets exhausting over time.
Still,
you have to admire Mokri’s ambition and his execution. The whole thing hangs
together remarkably well and his cast (mostly drawn from the stage) rises to
the challenge quite commendably. Ostensibly, there is nothing of a political
nature for state censors to object to in F&C,
but it is still somewhat surprising it has not been run afoul of the
authorities, who have been known to object to any “negative portrayal” of
Iranian society. A film about hillbilly cannibals would not exactly fit their
Lake Woebegone vision of contemporary Iran, where everybody is above average.
Of
course, nobody would wish him trouble and we should all be glad to have F&C screening openly for
international audiences. Combining elements of We Are What We Are and Before the Rain, Fish & Cat is
rather highly recommended for patient and adventurous viewers. It screens
tomorrow (3/27) at MoMA and Friday (3/28) at the Walter Reade as part of the
2014 ND/NF.
