Terrestrial Verses

(آیه های زمینی
Ayeh haye zamini)

dirs.: Ali Asgari & Alireza Khatami

2023

Iranian films. I review a fair few Iranian films. It’s probably still the tiniest fraction of flicks that are made and exported each year, because the ones I hear about are the ones that tour the festival circuit and occasionally win prizes or enough good reviews for them to come to my scattered attention.

To put it in the laziest, most cultural appropriation kind of way, I love their culture, I love their cinema history, and I abhor their theocratic and above all cruel totalitarian regime. Unlike other flicks that got international acclaim in the last couple of years, like Seed of the Sacred Fig, this flick doesn’t directly say the monstrous regime turns families against each other and tries to choke the life out of all, not just the womenfolk.

It takes a more oblique path, expressing a sometimes comical exasperation and disbelief rather than horror, but it’s powerful nonetheless. In nine vignettes it shows how the regime turns anyone in the slightest position of authority into a petty tyrant against their fellow citizens, getting them to inflict bureaucratic horrors even if they’re not part of the superstructure of control that is imposed upon all life in Tehran and beyond.

The first few minutes of the flick are a long shot over time lapse of Tehran, from late night to early morning, of a city waking up, of a crazy town rousing itself to start screaming obscenities at passers-by.

The first scene, of one long shot, like all the vignettes that will follow, is of a guy just wanting to register his newborn son’s name. The camera focuses on him, he’s looking just to the right of the camera at our unseen tormentor. The tormentors are always unseen, but we hear their nagging voices.

The young father just wants to register his son as David. He is told, such a name cannot be registered. It is not an Iranian name. And the battle continues. Imagine being told you cannot name your own child, that your wife cannot chose the name of the child she carried and birthed, that a petty bureaucrat has more of a say than either of you. I mean, I cannot pretend that other countries don’t similarly disallow certain names. I can imagine that were I to try to record my child’s birth as “Ron Hitler Barrassi” I will get some inevitable pushback. I cannot imagine it would be easy to record your child’s name as “Osama Bin Laden” in the US. I remember a story in the British tabloids years ago about some chap that wanted to register the birth of his twins by giving them the official names of “Search” and “Destroy”, seeing as he was a huge Stooges fan.

But I also know that my kid, in primary, went to school with two twins called Rocket and Spike, so within some parameters, it’s whatever people want, anything goes.

Not in Tehran. Nah, choosing a name like David is apparently a threat to the nation, to national security, because it is another instance of the West, the Great Satan, infecting and grinding its way into the fabric of the state, into the people’s hearts and minds.

Is it fuck… The young father is baffled by this turn of events, but all he has is petty annoyance with which to combat the forces of control. The petty bureaucrat has the regime behind him, or if he doesn’t, it hardly matters. There is no recourse, no way of appealing, no ombudsman to complain to. If he pushes back too hard, well, this is a regime that kills women for not wearing their headscarfs tight enough, and kills others for just saying “women”, “life” or “freedom”, and not necessarily in that order.

When asked why he wants to call his son David, he has to explain it. Justify it. Can you imagine someone having the temerity, the unmitigated gall to question you in Australia, in Canada, as to why you want to name your child whatever name you want to give them? You’d tell them to go fuck themselves unless they were asking in the spirit of genuine curiousity, like “so, is there a family history-connection as to why you want to call your kid Mabel, or do you just like older names?”

To which you could reasonably answer “Nunya”.
- “Sorry, what was that?”
”None of ya fucking business!”

To which they’d say “very good sir” and then record the name however you wanted it anyway.

Not in Iran. In Iran, as is the goal in all totalitarian regimes, they want Iranians to police themselves and each other, to do the work of the State for free.

Each of the further instalments has a variation on a theme, a different lens on the same problem, from different perspectives, but with the same perversity, the same Kafkaesque surreality, that people are doing it to each other, whether they’re selling children’s clothes, hiring staff, running a girl’s school or issuing fines to car drivers who may be male or female but who may or may not have been driving with or without a headscarf at the time.

That’s another amazing, galling, gutting argument – Aram (Sarvin Zabetian) asks the person who’s grilling her at the Iranian equivalent of the Road Traffic Authority or Department of Motor Vehicles, as to whether the inside of a car constitutes a private space, a private area. In theory at least women are “allowed” to have their hair uncovered when they’re in a private space. And she is told in no uncertain terms that the inside of her own car does not constitute a private space because people can potentially see into it. Or a house that has windows. In other words, there are no private spaces from the regime.

This is the point – in such a regime, no place is private, the state intrudes everywhere and in everything, you can never be free of its nagging or its judgement, probably not even on the toilet.

A director tries to make a film, and has to deal with the indignity of a moronic philistine who until recently worked at the Ministry of Transport, and now rules the roost at the Ministry of Culture, telling him what isn’t allowed in the script he’s written about his own life experiences. You can’t have a father acting bad because that implies fathers can be bad, and that threatens the whole patriarchy thing. So rip them pages out of the script. Doesn’t matter if it happened in your life, you don’t have the right to tell your own family’s story in the new improved Iranian state: you should only tell the stories sanctified by the Qur’an.

So what if I tell the story of Joseph in the Qur’an, he asks, verbatim, like the bit where one of his brother’s wives tries to seduce him. You know, just like it says in the Qur’an.

No, no, he’s told, only vague outlines, only tell happy stories from the Qur’an, with none of the so called holy details of shit that definitely for real happened.

Infuriating. The more pages he rips out of the script, the happier his persecutor. Until there’s nothing left to film or perform, which is probably the perfect script from the Ministry of Culture’s perspective.

The chap who wants his licence renewed, and has to justify what “normal” is to the licence issuing jerk, who accuses him of having tattoos, forced to debase himself just for a two year licence… The older woman who just wants her dog back from the shitty police who took it for no other reason other than spite… the poor chap who has to mime how he performs his ablutions at Friday prayers at the mosque, as if that was part of the factory job he was applying for; the stakes seem small, but the accumulation of humiliations, desperation, indignity: it can't go on like this forever, for so many people, can it?

The title of the movie, which, I swear, is more hopeful than any of this sounds, being Terrestrial Verses, comes from a poem by Foragh Farrokzhad, which spoke in apocalyptic terms about social change that she longed for, to cast aside the awfulness of the reinstated Shah’s secret police, and then the Islamic Revolution becoming somehow even worse than what they had before, which since then has treated life itself as its enemy. But she hoped for a time when the Iranian people would no longer be persecuted (by the Iranian people or anyone else, hopefully), and I think we have longer to wait.

There is an element, an aesthetic, a link throughout the vignettes, which is literalised in the movie’s last images, of an earthquake that will come; is it a natural disaster? is it Allah’s judgement? that will call the wicked to account for all the awful stuff they put people through in the name of a regime that really didn’t have anyone’s best interests at heart. Will people have the luxury of looking back and thinking “wow, we really did put people through so much unnecessary shit”, or will they just shrug their shoulders and rationalise it all away by saying “fuck it, we were just following orders.”

But that’s the thing. No-one is ordering the unseen persecutors to do what they’re doing in each segment. It’s not the law that they’re following; it’s not necessity, circumstance or even self-interest: It’s inhuman and petty control for control’s sake. And it has to end like the regime has to end, so these wonderful people can breathe a free breath again, for fuck’s sake.

9 times this is no way to live out of 10

--
“But you would ever see
These small murderers
Standing
And staring at
The constant fall of fountains.” - Terrestrial Verses