Iranian Cinema Uncensored: Contemporary Film-makers Since the Iranian Revolution
by shiva rahbaran
i. b. tauris, 336 pages, $35

In July 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini accepted the cease-fire that brought the Iran-Iraq War to a close. He likened it to downing a “poisoned chalice.” Iranian and Iraqi forces had spent the previous eight years grinding each other down in the trenches. Saddam Hussein resorted to poison gas. The Iranians used children to clear minefields. All told, more than a million people were killed. The result was a stalemate.

For all its horror, however, the war inspired few memorable Iranian movies. This is odd. Beginning in the late 1980s, Iran’s postrevolutionary cinema captivated festival juries and Western audiences with its idyllic imagery and contemplative themes, its poetry and simplicity. Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean-Luc Godard championed Iranian film, and a number of productions even found Hollywood distributors. You would think that the twentieth century’s longest conventional conflict would also provide the raw material for many a great Iranian film. Yet it wasn’t until last fall that a truly compelling Iranian war movie appeared. Only, it wasn’t a war flick—or even strictly Iranian.

Under the Shadow (2016) is a conventional haunted-house picture, impeccably executed. It adheres faithfully to the rule that supernatural horror is all the more terrifying when it is barely seen or explained. But the U.K.-Jordanian-Qatari coproduction, directed by Iranian-born Babak Anvari, has more than genre tropes on its mind.

Set in Tehran in 1988, Under the Shadow is about a middle-class family struggling to carry on in wartime. Shideh (Narges Rashidi), her husband, Iraj (Bobby Naderi), and their young daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), are caught between Saddam’s missiles and the ayatollah’s morality police. The authorities bar Shideh from finishing her medical studies. She had flirted with leftist politics during the revolution, and “every mistake has a price,” as a bearded regime apparatchik tells her in the opening. An Iraqi missile strikes a nearby building as he says this, but the man barely registers it. He keeps sucking a sugar cube, sipping tea, and foreclosing on Shideh’s professional dreams. Every Iranian will recall similar interactions with the ruling Islamists.

At home, a fight erupts between husband and wife. Iraj kept his head down and managed to finish his own medical studies—is it his fault that Khomeini’s revolution and childbearing interrupted Shideh’s? But the war doesn’t even permit the couple a good shouting match. Lights go out, and the family rushes to the basement to ride out the sirens. Soon Iraj must ship off to the front. All this happens before the arrival of the djinns, evil spirits that figure in the Qur’an and Persian lore.

As with all great horror, the supernatural terror in Under the Shadow extends from all-too-natural malice and anxiety. The ghosts pose historical dilemmas: How did we end up in this state? What possessed us—Iran’s comfortable, secular middle class—to replace the shah’s benign autocracy with Khomeini’s totalitarianism? Where did all these pious fanatics come from, anyway, these djinns who seemed to ride the wind and soon conquered our streets and our homes? Why do our lives remain hostage to the same obsessions, while others seem to move ahead?

Iranian cinema has revolved around these questions since 1979. But Anvari articulates them with more honesty and immediacy than do many of the Iranian filmmakers who are the toast of Cannes and Berlin. His genre movie is more realistic—more capable of expressing contemporary Iranian-ness—than much of Iran’s celebrated social-realist cinema.

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