9 stars

dir: Jafar Panahi

2025

It’s not that strange that there would be people who might think that there are no accidents, no coincidences, that all is planned or fated or meant to be. We like to think that we are free agents, with free will and self-determination, even though there’s no shortage of scientists / neurologists telling us, depressingly, that consciousness may be an illusion.

I think this flick is using the title ironically (uh derr fred, someone might say, if this was forty years ago, or 28 Years Later, for that matter). Running over a stray dog may have been accidental, but everything that transpires from then on is dripping with intentionality.

This flick, as you would expect from the Iranian master of cinema, Jafar Panahi, does a sly bait and switch in its opening minutes: we observe a husband and wife driving down a road on the outskirts of what we assume is Tehran. Panahi hasn’t been able to make a movie in Iran for decades because of the stupid authoritarian regime without being jailed, so it’s probably not filmed in Iran, but what do I know?

The accidental running over of a stray dog results in the family car needing repairs, which results in the car ending up at a mechanic’s garage.

The mechanic loses his mind when he hears the customer walking about: the guy that was driving has a prosthetic leg, and the mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), fears he knows the sound of that prosthetic leg all too well. Vahid is convinced that this guy was his torturer when he was kidnapped off the street, kept without reason or legal charge, and tormented by a guy they called Eghbal, or “Peg-Leg” (Ebraham Azizi).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that ‘Peg-Leg’ is probably an ableist slur, but, contextually, I will point out that the people who use it in the film are people who were horribly tortured by the jerk who did it on behalf of one of the worst regimes in human history. I mean, in reality, the fuckers have slaughtered something close to 20,000 protesters in the last fortnight, leaving out all the other awful stuff they’ve been doing to their own people for years.

The second point I’d make is that they, his victims, don’t know his real name.

Third point is, and the flick hinges on this, Vahid and the other people who he knows who were tortured, have never seen the chap. They don’t know what he looks like.

dir: Mary Bronstein

2025

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You sounds like both an empty threat and like the punchline to a strained, perhaps Yiddish, joke. What it is, is a film which exists as a primal scream of maternal rage aimed at channelling the frustration that comes from living in a world that pays lip service to the wonderfulness of motherhood, and the complete abandonment women face in getting the support they need to survive that comes with it.

It is not a comedy or a horror film, but it does include elements of both. I don’t even feel completely comfortable calling it a drama. Rose Byrne, Australia’s Own Rose Byrne, plays the central role, and brings all the anger, disbelief, and terror that she can muster and that the role requires.

If I was to say that it’s a fairly harrowing movie, it might make you think it’s something on a level with Requiem for a Dream or the flicks of Gasper Noé. I think that would misrepresent the flick somewhat. I’m talking about something closer akin to the recent Mike Leigh film Hard Truths, where a main character is deliberately unlikeable and gives no quarter to anyone. It is a difficult watch, but it’s not necessarily because the subject matter is too traumatic or the film is visually gory or upsetting. It’s a difficult watch because it’s about a woman no longer able to hide her dissatisfaction with being a mother.

And because it’s honest, it’s painful. People don’t want to hear it, whether they’re characters in this movie or members of an audience. They don’t want to hear women playing characters expressing how much they are not enjoying being mothers some of the time. They want neat narratives about women struggling to balance looking after little ones, themselves and any of their personal and professional ambitions, and deciding that sacrificing themselves is the best course of action for all concerned.

إن شاء الله ولد
Inshallah walad

dir: Amjad Al Rasheed

2023

This is the Jordanian remake of Kinda Pregnant, and instead of Amy Schumer in the lead we have Palestinian actor Mouna Hawa playing a recently widowed woman in Jordan just trying to get by in a country that clearly hates women. And She’s a Woman!

Structurally, culturally, legally, everything is set up to emphasise that women and girls ain’t shit compared to the lowliest man in Jordan. If a woman is married and she hasn’t borne the MAN a SON, she doesn’t even inherit property from her husband when he dies – his brothers inherit instead.

How’s that for a kick in the teeth? And how is that for showing up how meaningless the complaints of American (white) women’s first world problems are in comparison?

Oh no, they mixed up my drink order and wrote the wrong name on my coffee cup boo hoo think I’ll pretend I’m pregnant to get revenge on the world.

No, Nawal has far more to worry about than that. When her shitty husband pops off this mortal coil unexpectedly, the vultures start circling almost immediately. I say her husband Ahmad was shitty because he really did leave her seemingly deliberately in a terrible financial and legal position by having neglected to do a number of actions that would have safeguarded his wife and daughter from what is to come, mostly because he was a shitty person who had been lying and cheating on her before his death. You can’t expect a class act like that to look out for his nearest and dearest, can you?

No. But he would have expected the system, the Patriarchal System, to screw her over the first chance it got, and that clearly did not keep him up at night, adding to the irony that he dies in his sleep.

(გადასვლა)

dir: Levan Akin

2024

At the moment, at this very moment, I don’t want to think about, talk about, watch or write about Americans. I am so thoroughly fucking sick of them. I don’t want to have to think about them or their appalling politics, at least for the next, I dunno, four years or so. The way they pervade everything, and force us to have to watch them, like a dog licking its anus and maintaining eye contact with us the whole while, against our will or our own priorities; it is really is quite terrible, honestly.

So instead of thinking or talking about them, let us look at the lives, the troubles, the daily lived realities of a bunch of Georgians and at least one Turkish woman. No, not appalling people from that southern state of the Americas: I mean the former Soviet republic and now currently Russian occupied / vassal state with its own wacky language and alphabet. I mean look at how cool it looks “საქართველო”.
Now that’s wacky. Solely from what I’ve seen in this movie, which I think is my first exposure to movies from this country, I’m guessing it’s a pretty impoverished place. One person’s squalor is another person’s luxury, I guess, but it’s hard to see these lives as occurring in anything other than precarious circumstances.

But that’s how it looks to me. To people from there or around there maybe these people are living the high life, I dunno. When the film starts at some coastal town, there are a bunch of adults in a shack mostly yelling at each other. The main guy is yelling at his wife, who is trying to breastfeed, his younger brother is just waking up, who he seems to routinely violently attack, and he probably also starts yelling at some random cloud floating by. Making matters worse it looks like it’s a one room shack, at best two. Constructed maybe out of cigarette packets, or other shack-like materials.

And then a woman walks past, clearly not from around there but also looking for something or someone.