8 stars

(کیک محبوب من,
Keyk-e mahbub-e man)

dirs. Maryam Moghaddam & Behtash Sanaeeha

2024

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I’m not even sure what my favourite cake would be, but I don’t think you’ll be surprised if I lead with the fact that this flick is probably, despite its title, not about cake or cakes in general.

It’s about contemporary life in Tehran under the regime, and how depressing it is, independent of how life for a widow or widower can be sad or lonely without enough to keep you occupied in between cakes. And it’s not just the matter of community expectations, or conservative cultural morays, or of the actual literal Morality Police who patrol the streets and kill women for allowing their hair to be visible.

Mahin (Lily Farhadpour) remembers the city before the revolution. She remembers how people partied, and danced, and sang. But that was so long ago. She also remembers when her husband was alive, which was also a long time ago, thirty years to be precise. Her children have grown up, and fled this totalitarian nightmare, and she is alone. Alone, bored, lonely, craving human contact and perhaps human touch. She has trouble sleeping so naturally stays up late into the night watching trashy romantic dramas, and then sleeps in until noon, most days.

She still has some friends (alive). All women, obviously, since friendship or contact with a non-relative male would probably get you arrested at the very least. And they are all widows too, who get together and nostalgise in between complaining about their physical ailments.

Being 70, her freedom is a little bit physically limited, but the bigger limitations are ever present, and invisible, except when characters choose to make themselves emblematic, and then those limitations become more literal. She hears conflict, when having visited a park, of a girl being harassed by the Morality Police, who are trying to drag her into a van because she’s not wearing her hijab properly. She fearlessly pushes back at one of the MoPos, telling him how dare he pick on innocent women for no good reason, and doesn’t he have a mother himself, how would she feel if she saw him brutalising women?

His retort is “ah, you must be one of these women that provokes the Morality Police and then get someone else to film it on their phones, and then post it to social media”, which must be a very standard response, and you’d have to think the perfect retort would be “We didn’t make you dumb goons kill Mahsa Jina Amini, you clods did that all on your lonesome”, and all that followed in the Woman Life Freedom protests that ensued.

It makes me, unfortunately, think of the old phrase “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, a process which started just after the revolution, and doesn’t seem like it’s ever likely to end under this despotic regime.

And it’s funny (it’s not funny at all) that now these directors, and the actors, are in danger of being jailed or worse for making this flick, accused of all sorts of nonsense by the regime, and of being tools of outside influence, in the pay of American masters etc.

It’s as if they constantly re-forget that no-one hates and seeks to destroy the Iranian people more so than the Iranian regime.

dir: Rich Peppiatt

2024

Wow. This was like a breath of fresh air.

Well, admittedly, some parts of it felt like familiar, recycled air, with a strong smell of alcohol on its breath, but it was a lot of fun, and a trenchant reminder that Ireland is still an occupied country.

Also, within the context of a film about the attempts by certain Irish people to keep their language (and thus identity outside of the UK) alive, and the repositioning of the Irish Republican movement as an indigenous movement against the occupying British, it’s a fucking funny, deeply political, yet chaotic story.

For all its seeming DIY-zine-handcrafted-mixtape-bedroom recording aspects, there are a bunch of professionals thrown into the mix with the rank amateurs that are the two rascally ‘boys’ that really make up both the narrative and the band known as Kneecap.

And what a pair they are. I should probably mention, this is only the second film I’ve seen that’s mostly in Gaelic, or Irish as they call it to each other here. In other words, it’s subtitled a lot of the time. Because the speaking of their so-called native tongue plays such a big part in the story, and the lads are shown (and we hear them) rapping in Gaelic, it’s safe to say that at least from a viewer’s perspective, if you’re not okay with subtitles, this is not a flick you’re going to get a lot out of beyond the visuals of crazy drug-addled partying and Trainspotting inspired cheeky violence and shenanigans.

Which is, I guess, not much of a problem for me, as a non-Gaelic speaker but who absolutely loves to read subtitles. I’m not sure who the actual target market is for such a flick, beyond Ireland itself, but its argument is mostly a universal one. Well, it’s universal unless you’re actually one of those strange, dead inside people who support the oppressors over the oppressed, colonisers over those striving for freedom or if you stan for billionaires.

As for the music / rapping well, they have a target audience, and I’m not it, since I’m not Irish and I take no drugs whatsoever (in case the peelers are listening in on this one-sided conversation), but I can enjoy people rapping about their lives and keeping it real and falling all over the place whilst smacked out of their heads on coke and ketamine often at the same time.

Into their orbit these fuckups luck upon someone both sympathetic to their cause and who can actually put together some tracks. He’s a teacher who moonlights as a translator when one of the boys gets picked up by the peelers and refuses to speak anything other than his mother tongue.

dir: Chris Sanders

2024

Okay, so, yes – this is a far more conventional “animated” movie of what people think of when you say that something is animated – lots of movement, lots of colour, lots of dialogue filling up the empty spaces, far more so than the last animated movie that I watched, being Robot Dreams. There should be room in this world for both, but let’s be honest; for every quiet, dialogue-free painstakingly animated story that talks about the sorrows and aches of loneliness and love lost, there are three million animated flicks with pets and their secret lives or yellow idiots or ogres or dragons being trained or toys who’ve lost their way but have a story to tell.

Also there’s those Pixar ones about people’s feelings ugh.

So, whilst this is conventional, as in, a story so simple and straightforward you feel like you’ve watched it before you’ve even watched it, it manages to be very enjoyable.

Very enjoyable. As in, it deliberately crowbars the emotions out of you that a subtler flick would gently try to coax.

Lifting from almost every animated movie ever made, The Wild Robot sort of manages to be its own thing, at least for long enough at certain moments, that you can forget all of that. Comparison is the thief of joy, or so they say, so talking about a movie where the main character is a robot that transcends the limitations of its programming and learns to love seems like you could be describing almost every movie where the music swells and people / creatures / androids hug.

But that’s okay. I grinned / cried like an idiot at several points, knowing full well that I was being manipulated, and that’s… acceptable. They fooled me yet I am thanking them for it.

Rozz (Lupita Nyong’o) is a robot that’s washed up on the shores of an island somewhere. There are a bunch of animals on the island, but none of them speak English, motherfucker, do you speak it? Sorry, that was from Pulp Fiction, about the only flick this doesn’t lift from.

Rozz has their programming. They are programmed to do whatever a customer wants or requires. But there are no customers on the island that can communicate a need or a want. There’s just a bunch of animals, who regard the robot as a monster.

This monster, struggling for meaning and purpose, goes “native” and learns the local lingo through a process I call “magic”, since animals don’t speak languages, and they don’t all speak English, but which the flick calls “deep learning” or something similarly made up. They can now speak to all the creatures in a manner even Doctor Doolittle would envy, but they’re still not getting anywhere closer to meaningful work.

Please state the nature of the medical emergency. On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?

(دانه‌ی انجیر معابد)
(Dāne-ye anjīr-e ma'ābed)
dir: Mohammad Rasoulof

2024

This is a lot of a movie, which means there’s going to probably be a lot of review.

Boo. Sounds like homework.

This director’s previous movie was the heartbreaking meditation on what the death penalty in Iran under its current leadership does to the living, more so than the dead. Called There is No Evil, in English at least, it argued in its title alone that there was no need to blame the Devil or any supernatural source for the evil that humans perpetrate, especially within a totalitarian regime.

That flick, made surreptitiously away from governmental scrutiny, earned its director a prison sentence and a beating. He has since been sentenced to more years in jail, like every decent Iranian director before him, so he had to escape the country on foot.

I don’t know how he made this flick. I worry for the actors in it, because this regime has killed people for far less. This film crosses a line that Iranian directors never cross: directly criticising the regime, openly advocating for those who protest against its strictures and draconian, inhuman ways, and openly showing footage that would get most Iranians jailed or worse for sharing.

None of it is allegorical any more, or spoken of in the abstract. It leant a quality to Iranian cinema that people appreciated, especially international film critics, having to slyly dance around its subject matter in order to keep the authorities happy. So everyday life and its complications would transpire with the state / morality police / Revolutionary Guards way, way in the background, in lyrical and poetic ways, for our amusement, but with this pleading note behind it all, begging us to support their aspiration towards freedom.

That was then. This is now.

This film includes footage from the protests that came after complete fucking idiot scumbags murdered a young woman for not wearing a hijab. But they were only doing their jobs. Her name was Mahsa Zhina Amini, and she was a young Kurdish – Iranian woman, and the authorities still deny that she was beaten to death (maintaining an official fiction that she might have died because of a random stroke), and yet when people protested en masse, the authorities starting killing people in the streets, beating and torturing them in cells, or officially executing them because they had the temerity to say that Mahsa was killed for not wearing a hijab.

Really, she was killed for being a woman.