Persian delight

Iranian master Mohsen Makhmalbaf

A thrilling retrospective at the MFA (May 16 through June 13) reveals him to be one of the most important filmmakers in the world. Yet Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf started out as a high-school dropout with a hatred of cinema. An Islamic fundamentalist as a Teheran teenager, he plugged up his ears when he passed a store playing music, and he stopped talking to his mother because she'd gone to see a movie.

This extremist period of Makhmalbaf's life concluded at age 17, when he and guerrilla pals attempted to knife a street policeman. He was shot and turned over to Savak, the Shah's infamous secret police. He spent months in a hospital with torture wounds, then four and a half years in jail.

That's where he grew suspicious of political movements and of the value of violence, and where he began to write and direct plays for other prisoners. His conversion experience in jail was akin to that of a Malcolm X or an Eldridge Cleaver. When he returned to the world, with the 1979 victory of Khomeini, he was, ironically, no longer a fundamentalist. He attended movies, studied international classics, then wrote, directed, and edited his own films.

The first works, such as Fleeing from Evil to God (1984; screens May 31 and June 6), are heavyhandedly religious. Quickly they become secular, with wonderful music tracks. In Boycott (1985; June 8 and 13), Makhmalbaf re-creates the ill-fated police shooting and subsequent imprisonment via Western-style melodrama. The Cyclist (1987; May 25 and 30) pays homage to de Sica's The Bicycle Thief through its allegorical story of a peasant man and his son who fight for dignity in the pitiless big city. The man hires out as a one-person circus attraction, riding a bicycle nonstop in a tiny circle for days and nights without end. He's scrupulously honest, but as with Kafka's starving "The Hunger Artist," nobody believes he's not a cheat.

The Peddler (1987; May 16 and 24) is Makhmalbaf's masterpiece, a throbbing, unruly spillage onto the screen of subterranean Teheran, as fresh and raw as Rossellini's postwar Italy of Paisan. Neo-realism is reinvigorated in today's chaotic Middle East.

It's hardly surprising that several of Makhmalbaf's works have been banned, including Time of Love (1990; May 26 and June 7), a Rashomon-like, not-unsympathetic exploration of a woman's adultery filmed in Turkey. But he's also done films in Revolutionary Iran that seem pretty risqué and modern.

The Actor (1993; June 8 and 13), a screwball hit at home, features Akbar Abdi, Iran's chubby-cheeked comic superstar, as a movie actor fixed up by his wife with a second spouse, a deaf-and-dumb Gypsy, so that he can have children. He falls in love with the Gypsy, and their romance takes them high and low, including a suite in Teheran's fanciest hotel.

The oddest scene in the movie has the wife trapping a little boy in her house so she can get his urine for a witch's spell on her husband. "Piss! Piss!" she intimidates the child.

What did the censors say?

The most guarded films in the MFA's Makhmalbaf series are a pair of too-worshipful documentaries about the director, Cinema Cinema (1994; May 16 and 24) and Stardust Stricken -- Mohsen Makhmalbaf: A Portrait (1996; May 26 and June 7). Far more can be learned about this adamantly unsentimental man by watching his own Salaam Cinema (1995; May 17 and 23), which was prompted by Makhmalbaf's announcement in Teheran newspapers that he was seeking actors to celebrate cinema's 100th year. On the Day of the Locusts, 5000 strong and weak push through barricades for a chance to be in movies.

Those few who get to Makhmalbaf, who sits behind a table, are treated imperiously. They are bullied and belittled, and psychologically tested, though they are poor and desperate and he has all the power. Instead of giving them scenes to act, he makes the men fall ridiculously to the floor, as if being shot in an action picture. He forces everybody to cry before he reaches a count of 10. Those who can't coax tears, he orders, "Be gone!"

Presumably there's reason for Makhmalbaf's behaving so wickedly. "It's not me, it's the cinema that's cruel," he tells a humiliated auditioner. But it is him, and it's hard to unravel his message in this nevertheless extraordinarily absorbing film.

The compassionate Makhmalbaf? He's evident in A Moment of Innocence (1996; May 16 and 24), a psychodrama of a documentary in which the director invites the policeman who shot and arrested him when he was 17 to participate in a re-creation of the key incident of Makhmalbaf's life. For once, the mood is forgiveness. Yes, there is crying on screen. It's another masterwork in the most essential Boston film series of early summer.

UNDERWORLD is a vile, witless, sexist, gangster film at the Coolidge Corner, MTV Mamet, with Joe Mantegna as one detestable guy and Denis Leary as another. They're psycho pals. Is the word "fuck" used more in Underworld than people are blown away? It's bloody awful, and an insult to Quentin to deem this post-Tarantino.