The opening images of a burning car in a field at night as viewed by an approaching driver quickly communicate the major strength of this debut feature for Iranian writer-director Fardin Saheb Zamani. With intense yellows and reds against a background of intense cobalt blue, the use of colour is unusually striking for an Iranian film, the imagery communicating a sense of foreboding strengthened by constant references throughout to an expected earthquake.
Zamani continues with the visual technique as he splashes bright colours against walls and draws attention to the redecoration of a café where two of the leading characters regularly meet. Unfortunately, this and the director’s creative use of sound raise expectations scuppered by the film’s frustratingly inert narrative.
The film is hooked on Ali (Ali Mossafa), a taciturn, university-educated man who lives alone and works the night shift as a cab driver. Though we’re given little background information, it’s clear his life has been a disappointment and that he’s profoundly lonely. For much of the film we’re in the cab with Ali on his shifts, watching as he listens in on the conversations between his passengers and sometimes reluctantly joining in.
Two passengers stand out, both of them outstandingly beautiful women. The first is a stranger he has to pick up at a pre-arranged time every night (Leila Hatami, who also co-stars in the multiple prize-winning A Separation, also screening in the first Iranian Film Festival Australia, though in Brisbane only).
The second is Sima (Mahtab Kermati), an old acquaintance whose identity initially seems mysterious but who turns out to be a friend from university who has since married one of Ali’s friends. When Sima tells him she’s thinking of going to work in Dubai and asks him for his opinion on whether she should go, Ali reacts, as he does to most events, with a sullen silence, but does not appear to be pleased.
At this stage it looks as if our cabbie is about to take a cue from his fictional predecessor, Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver – and go off the rails in an alarming and possibly violent manner. (Why else those earlier symbols of doom, the burning car and the earthquakes; why else include a passenger referring to 'Travis" in a phone conversation?)
To their credit, that was the story arc taken by the protagonists of two other Iranian films about alienated males, Rafi Pitt’s The Hunter – also screening in the festival – and Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold, both powerful depictions of urban malaise that implicitly critiqued Iranian society.
But Zamani has different plans. His hero is ultimately too much of a nice guy to lose his rag, hence his occasional nickname of 'Myshkin", a reference to the famously good hero of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. This might have worked in a novel, where we could gain access to his internal state, but as a film narrative it proves maddeningly lacking in dramatic juice. Drama by definition needs conflict – external, internal, or both. There Are Things You Don't Know has too little of either to sustain interest, making its way towards what turns out to its non-climax with an increasingly pronounced limp.
