BRISBANE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Life at home for many Iranian women is so oppressive that the only answer for them is to seek ways to leave, if some of that nation’s most prominent filmmakers are to be believed.
Asghar Farhadi’s powerful 2011 Berlinale and Sydney Film Festival best film winner, A Separation, opened with a woman desperate to emigrate petitioning an unsympathetic bureaucrat.
Meanwhile Granaz Moussavi’s 2009 Iranian-Australian co-production, My Tehran for Sale, revolved around a dissident actress trying to get permission to migrate to Australia (in real life its lead performer Marzieh Vafamehr was recently reprieved from a sentenced of 90 lashes and a year in jail for appearing in the film – enough to make anyone want to flee).
Now comes this drama from Mohammad Rasoulof (Iron Island; The White Meadows), who last year was arrested and sentenced to a year in jail for his filmmaking activities.
Goodbye was first screened to an audience at Cannes in May after being smuggled out of the country along with This Is Not a Film by fellow director Jafar Panahi , who was sent to prison for six years and banned from making films for 20 years at the same time as Rasoulof was sentenced.
This all makes depressing reading and there’s no denying that Goodbye makes for unapologetically grim viewing. Protagonist Noora (Leyla Zareh) is a Tehran lawyer who’s been barred from practice, apparently for advising women on human rights issues. She’s now trying to find a way of gaining permission to emigrate – she never announces where exactly, but makes it clear that anywhere would be preferable to Iran.
Her disadvantaged professional status may also be linked to her husband Merhdad’s journalism, which has led him to move to the country’s south to work as a crane driver following the forced closure of his newspaper.
The pregnant Noora has mixed feelings about whether she should keep the baby, and is frustrated by both her suspended professional status and her inability to get much done without officials demanding the signature of her husband.
Stylistically Rasoulof’s bleak and rather slow and studied film could hardly be more different from the explosively dramatic and energised A Separation, with its restlessly mobile camera work. The action here is largely de-dramatised, built around a series of scenes from everyday life that gradually accrete to form a damning picture of social oppression. Exposition is casual, so it can take a while to figure out exactly what’s going on and what it means (an Iranian audience may have an advantage here), though gradually most of the necessary contextual information does eventually emerge.
An extremely brave film, it’s also a tough and demanding watch that makes few concessions to viewers. Its major asset is visual acuity. Filmed in desaturated, shades of steely grey and blue, it shows in virtually every shot Rasouluf’s sharp eye for composition. Sometimes he focuses on just an arm or a hand in a manner reminiscent of austere French master Robert Bresson’s use of visual metonyms. Faces are often filmed in deep shadow or silhouette – an unmistakable metaphor for the oppression of Iranian society. All shots, whether of Noora on her apartment’s rooftop as a plane flies over, or inside painting her nails, are static and artfully framed.
By far the most chilling scene begins in the claustrophobic lift in Noora’s apartment block, where two men sharing the space accost her. They turn out to be security officers who go onto search her tiny flat.
Viewing The Circle, Panahi’s 2000 film about the position of Iranian women, I found myself wondering how an Iranian director could get away with being so bold about his government’s repression. Of course now we know that he hasn’t.
Watching Goodbye – whose title tragically suggests the filmmaker’s farewell to his own audience - I had a similar experience, only this time the sad outcome is already known. Aesthetically this film is too remote and dry to stand next to Panahi’s 2000 masterpiece or Farhadi’s recent film, but there’s no denying that in making it Rasoulof has showed enormous courage.
