A Moment of Innocence

Forbidding, fundamentalist Iran is the source these days of some of the world's most innovative and subtly self-reflexive cinema. Somewhat derivative of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees and his recent Taste of Cherry, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence still manages a few new twists in the film-within-a-film scenario. Twenty years ago the then teenage director, an anti-shah activist, was arrested after attacking a policeman. The policeman, now an actor, re-entered the director's life when he auditioned for one of his films. Makhmalbaf invited him to collaborate on a re-creation of the incident, and Innocence re-creates that attempt at re-creation.

This parallel-mirror effect does not, as you might expect, infinitely distance the truth -- instead it breaks through to startling epiphanies as the artifice seems to take on a life of its own. As Makhmalbaf and his one-time nemesis -- in fact a hulking yokel and a bit of a romantic -- try to coach the stand-ins for their youthful selves into their own perception of events, chance and compassion intrude. Limpidly simple, the resulting film reconciles the adversaries and vindicates the art of filmmaking and innocence itself.

-- Peter Keough