The third man

Dariush Mehrjui is one of Iran's best

by Chris Fujiwara

"THE FILMS OF DARIUSH MEHRJUI," At the Museum of Fine Arts April 23 through May 22.

In the competition for the small share of their attention that American distributors, exhibitors, critics, and audiences can spare foreign filmmakers, two Iranian directors -- Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf -- are way ahead of their countrymen. In Iran, however, the most highly regarded of them all is Dariush Mehrjui. The retrospective of Mehrjui's work that's touring North America, and has now landed at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a vindication.

With his second effort, the extraordinary The Cow (Gaav, 1970; April 24 at 3:45 p.m.), Mehrjui became the first Iranian director to be noticed in the West. The film takes place in a remote village whose few inhabitants live primitively, under constant threat of attack from a shadowy trio of foreign marauders. The only cow in the village belongs to one Hassan, and he is single-mindedly devoted to it. When the cow is found dead, the other villagers decide to bury it and tell Hassan that it ran away. Unable to cope with his loss, Hassan retreats to his barn and gradually assumes the animal's identity.

Never quite readable either as a simple neo-realist fable or as some poor relation of magic realism, The Cow is from the start a striking, elliptical piece. The village settings have the drained, slab-like directness of experimental theater; the actors, escaping stereotype (the acting in Mehrjui films is always great), create through gesture and motion sharp images of life in continual flux. Already in this early work, Mehrjui shows a formal boldness recalling Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose work he certainly knew) and Nagisa Oshima: breaking up the straightforward narrative, night sequences become eerily disconnected studies in chaotic encounters and visions, further pushed toward abstraction by the striking prepared-piano score by Hormoz Farhat.

The hero's position is rigorously logical but fatally flawed: nothing is good but my cow; good must exist; if there is no cow, I must be the cow. His dedication to this belief is a protest, in the face of which the other villagers band together. Only when the protest is silenced can the common rituals of life continue.

In his spare time a translator of Marcuse, Mehrjui faced many difficulties with the shah's censorship; his fifth feature, The Cycle (Dayereh Mina, 1977; April 30 at 8 p.m.), an account of illegal blood trafficking in Teheran, was denied release for three years. The 1979 revolution brought a new set of censors. Mehrjui spent several years in France, where he made a film about Rimbaud (not included in this series); after returning to Iran in the improved filmmaking climate of the late '80s, he made two films widely considered his best. The Tenants (Ejare Neshinha, 1987; May 1 at 3:45 p.m.) is a satire in which the tenants of a crumbling apartment building band together against a slimy realtor. In Hamoon (1990; May 15 at 3:15 p.m.), a portrait of an intellectual whose life is falling apart, Mehrjui sought to depict his generation's post-revolutionary turn from politics to mysticism.

Leila (1997; May 22 at 1 p.m.) is a brilliantly directed melodrama about an urban, upper-middle-class couple who learn that the wife is unable to bear children. Under pressure from her mother-in-law, the wife gradually persuades the husband to take a second wife. The film handles the couple's plight movingly; in the cajoling, hinting mother, always calling their house the moment they walk through the door, it also has an utterly believable portrait -- rare in films -- of ordinary evil. Leila is far from being an entirely dark work. There's no way for the wife not to appear masochistic or for the husband not to appear hypocritical, weak, and contemptible; yet the film never loses its compassion and humor, and its evocation of the symbolism of everyday life has beauty and mystery. We're left to ask ourselves how we would act in the same situation.

Mehrjui's latest, The Pear Tree (Derakht-e Golabi, 1998; April 23 at 8 p.m.), marks a slight retreat. A famous writer (Homayon Ershadi, the suicidal hero of Kiarostami's incredible Taste of Cherry) returns to the country home of his childhood to work on a book. During his bouts of writer's block, he finds himself running through memories of his impossible first love. The Pear Tree is filled with visual triumphs: the contrast between muted, gauzy interiors and bright yellow exteriors; the lingering fade-outs; the Renoirian eroticism of the scene in which the young hero watches his beloved sleeping. The metaphor that organizes all these images -- the barren pear tree in the orchard -- is almost too strong for the film, and in repeatedly returning to it, Mehrjui seems about to tip into the obvious at any moment. Fortunately, the film maintains to the end its balance and delicacy.

Speaking of writer's block . . . among the Mehrjuis not in the series, I particularly missed Pari (1995), his unauthorized adaptation of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. It was pulled from the series because of legal threats from Salinger.