The Seed of the Sacred Fig

(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.

The Woman, Life, Freedom protests erupted based on flawed calculations on the part of the protesters. In several other countries when mass protests erupt, the protesters make a calculation, being that if there’s enough of us, the likelihood of us individually perishing or being arrested and punished is lowered. They can’t beat / arrest / get all of us, they might think, can they?

They forget that the entire totalitarian regime exists to stomp on its own people forever, even if it’s all of them. The breathtaking scale of just how dedicated the regime is to exterminating its own people is stunning. And before you think I’m an idiot for framing things this way, I am of course being facetious, because I am certain every single one of the protesters, whether they died for their protesting or were permanently maimed, or are languishing in prison, or awaiting death at the scaffold, every one of them likely knew exactly what could happen. Because they know exactly the kinds of people that are in control.

They are the kinds of people who will torture you, or torture someone you love, telling you that not that the regime requires it, but that God demands it. And that you deserve it, because you know what you did. The “perfection” of totalitarian regimes, though, is that beyond the absurd and vast level of resources and manpower devoted to surveilling and brutalising your own population, it’s when they get people to surveil themselves that’s really the final form of this inhuman fuckery.

Iman (Missagh Zareh) is a good man, or at least he believes himself to be a good man. He has recently been promoted to the position of an investigating judge within the legal system in Tehran. Such a position potentially brings with it prestige, better accommodation, more money, and a gun. Why a complimentary gun? Because being an investigating judge means people could get angry at you for dispensing steaming hot bowls of tasty justice, and might come after you or your family.

The only problem that Iman identifies pretty early on is that being a man of conscience or integrity isn’t going to work with his new job. Now, every time he receives a file from a prosecutor that has been written upon, the sentence is whatever the prosecutor says it is. If it’s the death penalty, it’s the death penalty. He investigates nothing, doesn’t know if the people are guilty of anything or if they just looked funny at the prosecutor one day, or cut in line before them for a coffee or watermelon salad or petrol. Maybe the person now marked for death is completely innocent. Almost certainly, it means Iman is expected to condemn to death countless people a day.

During the protests over Mahsa’s death and the hijab in general, Iman is expected to condemn to death hundreds of people a day because they have somehow offended God.

What an absolute fucker God must be for Him to want this bullshit to happen in His name over the visibility of a woman’s hair?

It’s far more likely that, no, it’s actually the pieces of shit in positions of power within the regime that want people to die as examples to the rest of the population to pipe down, shut the fuck up, and obey above all else.

But what is Iman in relation to the regime? He didn’t sign up for this. And he’s a good man, with a loving, devoted wife and two bright daughters.

Well, who he is, is who everyone is, in Iran, once they get to a certain position. Someone who will compromise everything at first because he’s in a bind: The bind once you’ve committed to being a part of a bureaucratic atrocity; if you try to leave, which discredits the regime, you lose everything.

So, in order to go along to get along, you start rubber-stamping them death warrants, don’t you, and salve your conscience with the higher pay? And if your kids start questioning what in God’s name you’re doing, you accuse them of outside influence or going woke, and punish them, because surely that will distract them from the state sanctioned murder happening on the streets and off them as well.

And if one of your daughter’s friends is shot in the face with buckshot just for being near a campus, well, she was asking for it, wasn’t she? Because everyone was asking for it, by existing and being alive and wanting to live.

Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), as the judge’s wife, has the hardest role to play throughout this long, long film. She says her husband’s name so gently each time (before the latter part of the film), and tends to him so lovingly, taking his side in all arguments against the disbelief and justified anger of their daughters, arguing that the girls owe their father gratitude, and obedience in all things.

The early part of the flick shows the gradual, steadily growing way in which the new reality for this family, of being a complicit part of the execution system requires far more constraints and restrictions on people who already live fairly constrained lives, to a point. I mean, it’s Iran. It was contemporary Iran before the protests. In other words already a terrible place to live if you aren’t an obedient serf, or someone who likes to walk around without being attacked by morality police or other pieces of shit.

But now, Najmeh tries to coach the girls into basically surveilling themselves, and each other, and essentially cutting themselves off from everyone and everything happening. They are not to speak of their father’s job, or say anything ever to anyone, really, about anything, because it could reflect badly on their father, or have friendships with people, because that could reflect badly on their father, or breath inappropriately, because that could reflect badly on their father.

Najmeh isn’t a bad mother, in that, she’s not shown to be acting out of cruelty. It is fear. She fears anything bad happening to her husband. She says she doesn’t care about their daughter’s friends, in fact she seems to mistrust anyone outside of the family, which lasts until she seems like she doesn’t trust people within the family either. And yet when it comes time to help one of them, she can’t help herself even as she complains about it.

Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) is the elder daughter, and at college, while Sana (Setareh Maleki) is in high school. Neither of them accept the regime. They conform, where they have to; they wear the hijab outdoors, they comply with all the necessities to not be butchered in the street or some cell, but they do not accept the regime in their hearts or in their home. They both refuse.

This scares Najmeh, who is perpetually trying to protect the girls from themselves, from their father, from their own foolishness, but she also still hopes that her good husband Iman, with such a holy name, who is complicit in the state sanctioned murder of countless innocent people, will somehow be fair to his daughters.

The tension keeps escalating, and escalating and escalating, quite naturally, at first. These are, after all, troubled times. We see the footage the girls are watching on their smartphones. It’s actual footage from the protests, of indiscriminate and more targeted slaughter and brutality from September 2022. Whatever state sanctioned lies are shown on television, well, Rezvan and Sana, like all contemporary young people, never watch television, even in Iran. They get all their media from their phones, and they’re not going to watch state sanctioned tv broadcasts on their fucking phones, are they?

The first breaking point is when Iman discovers that his gun, his state-sanctioned gun for his state-sanctioned role as executioner-by-default, has gone missing.

It was there one minute. Then I sentenced a couple of hundred people to death, and then it was gone. It was just here a second ago…

Iman decides the enemy to the regime, and therefore himself, is no longer The Great Satan (America), or external agitators, or pop music, or feisty uni students, or professional protesters, or “the woke”. It’s not even those who actually might wish him harm at his job for their own advancement; the real enemy now is his family.

The flick goes from being mostly set in one location, being the family apartment, which deliberately feels like a tight space, claustrophobic, and filmed so as to only become more so as the dread mounts, to hitting the road (once Iman gets doxxed on social media, and starts thinking everyone including his family is out to get him, so they get the fuck out of the Iranian equivalent of Dodge), and then the film takes a genre turn into… something else.

Something very much else. You have to understand, there are no films out of Iran like this that I’ve ever seen or heard of. Almost every single frame of this flick would make a regime censor shit their pants for having seen something so blasphemous, or out of rage towards the people who made it. Never would a film be allowed to acknowledge the inhuman brutality of the regime, or Iranian people’s reactions to it.

But also, the last hour of the flick is like nothing I’ve ever seen out of Iran. Though no less compelling, it’s almost like it’s taking flight to a more artistic, or representational level after having started deeply entrenched in the realism and mundanity of the everyday.

The film’s climax happens in a maze, what looks like an ancient maze, which is really an abandoned village from long ago in the mountains. I feel like it’s saying something pre-revolutionary, like, this guy, who thought he was a good guy, has been driven insane, and thinks that if he returns his family to a primal state, that his madness will dissipate. That in a place where the regime doesn’t even seem to abide, maybe a great reset can occur, if he can just threaten his family into behaving.

But of course, whether out there in an ancient maze in the mountains, or in an apartment or court room in Tehran, the problem isn’t the regime anymore.

It’s him, and everyone else that capitulates to what the inhumanity of the regime gets them to do and justify, eaten away from the inside by guilt and paranoia. It’s no way to live.

It’s a lot of an ending, and I’m not one hundred per cent on whether the ending works that well in what was such a ‘realist’ kind of flick, but it is a just ending for a story steeped in what the ruling regime does to people’s humanity in Iran. It’s an image and a gesture that will mean more to Iranians than it will to other audiences, I think.

Though the director leaves us with no doubt that the young are the people who might save them. I don’t know how they’re going to do it - I pray to my gods that the Iranian people are one day free of this horrible regime - but they’re determined. And people like this director, and these actors are the ones risking everything to convince the world to help Iran one day be free.

A just and wise God would want the same thing.

I think this is a phenomenal film, even as there are a few scenes that stretch credulity, seeming like they’re from the cinema of other countries, and a few scenes that are a bit too aware of cinema canon, as in there are scenes one could almost argue are references or homages to maybe Hitchcock or even Kubrick. And the scenes where Iman tries to compel his family to confess, on camera, within a movie, while also referencing the countless confessions of those tortured or manipulated into confessions to spare family members by this regime, is almost too meta or clever.

And yet what keeps it meaningful is the performances. The daughters are never less than absolutely believable in their rage against a fundamentally unfair system that they cannot accept has any justification. And the mother who complies with everything the regime requires of her, and her husband requires of her, and yet she will still, when push comes to shove, defend her daughters from all these tyrants.

And even Iman, who starts off a good man, and degenerates into the monster the regime requires, he starts with gentle eyes and good intensions, and falls far, hardening his eyes and his heart to become what they demand.

This will win something at all the awards, including the Oscars. But it won’t be Iran’s entry in the Best International Film category: it will be Germany’s. How’s that for fucking irony?

8 times the sacred fig strangles other trees to propagate itself, like the regime does to the Iranian people, which is why it’s the film’s title out of 10

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“What curse has befallen me?” – the curse of family - The Seed of the Sacred Fig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbKLGsf1Syg