Magic-carpet rides

Gabbeh and The Spouse pull the rug out

"Life is color! Love is color!" jubilant characters proclaim in Gabbeh, Iranian iridescence aglow on the big screen at the Coolidge Corner. In one scene, a guest teacher (Abbas Sayyahi) gets rhapsodic before his primary-age pupils about the red of poppies, the yellow of wheat fields, the blue, blue of the sky, the way the adults on Sesame Street cream over the alphabet.

Not since 1966, when Michelangelo Antonioni painted a deeper green the verdant grass of Hyde Park for Blow-Up, has a director been so self-consciously messianic about color as Iran's Mohsen Makhmalbaf for Gabbeh. "The most beautiful film I've ever seen," a friend I brought to the screening whispered to me. Could be, whether it's the custardy snow of a winter desert or a long shot of an oasis that seems painted by Gauguin discovering Polynesia. Or the titular "gabbeh" -- an Iranian, natural-dye peasant rug -- being rinsed in a babbling brook.

What's this aesthetic all about? Makhmalbaf, Iran's most popular filmmaker, is atoning for his dour, puritanical adolescence when, under the spell of his religious Moslem grandmother, he rejected cinema as unholy stuff and spent five years imprisoned by the Shah as a fundamentalist terrorist. How transformed is he? "When I first saw Wings of Desire, I wished that my grandmother were still alive so that I could show her that not all movies take you to Hell," he explained in a 1995 interview. "There are some that can take you to Paradise -- the Paradise within life."

Open, sesame!

Gabbeh is shaped like an Arabian Nights fairytale. An ancient couple washing a gabbeh in the countryside meet a princess-like young woman, herself named Gabbeh, who relates a tale of woe. She's been engaged forever to a mysterious horsebacked suitor who follows after her nomadic family as they traverse Iran's deserts, the seasons spinning. He's always there, rearing on his white steed like the Lone Ranger, howling in the wind a wolf's cry of passion, Tarzan craving his Jane.

But there are endless obstacles. Gabbeh's hot-tempered father doesn't approve. Before she can marry, her aging uncle must find a bride. Before she can marry, her mother must give birth to a baby. Before she can marry, her family must come out of mourning for her deceased little sister. And so on, year after year.

Until, one day, Gabbeh and the lover run away. The father comes after, with a large rifle!

Makhmalbaf invariably populates his films with nonprofessionals, but the casting of Gabbeh is genuinely radical. The old couple were a real-life husband and wife in their late 80s who had never seen a movie. The nomads, who appear cut into the film from the real world, in an ingenious stroke of anthropology, were actually non-nomads picked from actor auditions.

The spunky uncle-turned-teacher (Sayyahi) seemed a ringer in the film: a famous Iranian comic, I figured, who was brought on to inject some thespian professionalism. Wrong. He's a retired teacher who owns a dye factory and has revived the traditional way of dyeing wool for making gabbehs.

The most amusing biography is that of 25-year-old Shaghayegh Jodat, the beautiful Scheherazade-like Gabbeh, who carries the film. She first popped up in Salaam Cinema, Mahkmalbaf's documentary of an open-casting session he held in Teheran. Thousand of starstruck Iranians showed up, desperate to make a movie. Jodat strolled in completely disinterested in cinema but begging to be cast because the film might show at foreign festivals, allowing her to visit her boyfriend, who lived abroad.

---

MORE IRANIAN CINEMA: Mehdi Fakhimzadeh's The Spouse, (at the MFA August 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, and 13) isn't a very special film to look at -- TV-movie quality at best -- but the theme sure is a surprise. It's hard to believe that a feature produced in today's Iran could be so hardcore feminist, and so totally committed to the equality of the sexes.

Is the resemblance to the 1948 pre-feminist Hollywood Tracy-Hepburn classic Adam's Rib coincidental? Both films feature a rich, complacent couple, with husband and wife holding high-power jobs; in both cases the marriage is threatened when the wife suddenly, righteously, takes the side of a beleaguered female. The husband objects, and soon they're fighting on the job and squabbling at home. Can their relationship re-establish itself with a more conscious equality at the end of the domestic strife?

In The Spouse, husband Ahmad (Mehdi Hashemi) and wife Shirin (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria) are executives for the same Teheran pharmaceutical company. Their alienation begins when she attacks the male boss for firing a female worker; it escalates when the boss is the one fired, and she, rather than her husband, is made the new chief executive. Worse yet, she starts investigating his work buddies for allegedly selling medicine on the black market.

What's remarkable for Iranian cinema? A scene in which Shirin walks down the hall with her arm around another female worker. A women-behind-the-wheel noir car chase, with Shirin and a policewoman speeding after a burly bad guy. The ending, which, even given the rest of the film, is startlingly progressive. The last-second compromise simply doesn't happen.