The Berlinale Golden Bear awarded to Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation almost exactly a year ago seemed to indicate a new phase in Iranian cinema. Just as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof were being jailed and banned from filmmaking by an increasingly authoritarian regime, so a different style of Iranian filmmaking – fast-moving, immediate and using handheld camera – was announcing itself.
Mohsen Abdolvahab, an experienced documentary and short film director, makes his fictional feature debut with Please Don’t Disturb, a tryptych of interlinked stories of everyday life in Tehran. Very quickly it becomes obvious Farhadi’s film was no isolated break-away from the more formal style of filmmaking usually associated with Iranian art cinema.
The tales here could be paraphrased by the catchline from the 1948 Jules Dassin film noir and spin-off teleseries, The Naked City: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been three of them." While built around a sprawling number of themes (crime, money, marriage and divorce, paranoia, television), they all feature heated negotiations.
The first, much of it taking place on footpaths and noisy urban highways, captures a domestic dispute between a well-known male TV quiz show host and his wife, who, it gradually emerges, is a victim of domestic violence. After she storms out of their home to report his abuse to the police, he gives chase and pleads, somewhat pathetically, for her to change her mind – think what it’ll do to his public standing.
The theme of personal authenticity versus public image is a major theme. Meanwhile, his unwillingness to apologise and ready recourse to 'everyone does it" arguments speaks volumes about attitudes to domestic violence among at least some Iranian men. 'Men have beaten women since the Stone Age – it’s in our blood!" he pleads. Her reply must seem extraordinarily liberating to a domestic female audience: 'it’s cultural reform, honey!"
The second tale overlaps with the first, much in the style of Richard Linklater’s Slacker. A taxi parked in front of the squabbling couple’s vehicle becomes the locus for a story of an Imam who serves as a notary in charge of certificates for weddings and divorces. When he alights from the cab and reaches for his money from his leather case, he realises he was robbed earlier.
In his office, he receives a phone call from the thief, who demands he pays him for much-needed documents. Strange negotiations ensue. At the same time, he refuses to grant a wedding certificate to a young man and a much older woman because he’s convinced he’s only doing it for the money.
Story number three concerns an elderly couple dealing with a TV repair man. What should be a straightforward event becomes absurdly problematic: they’re too paranoid about strangers to allow the man into their flat (despite the fact he has his baby with him in a carry-cot). The almost surrealistic events that follow capture perfectly the absurd private worlds that old couples can sometimes construct around themselves, the result of their increasing isolation from the outside world.
Abdolvahab deploys handheld camera with élan (it’s unerringly in the right spot) and with discipline (meaning he avoids needless jerky-cam). The film’s pace is breathless; the sense that ordinary city life routinely produces extraordinary dilemmas is inescapable.
