Persian delights

State of the Art

by Peter Keough

If the United States and Iran ever reconcile, give some credit to the latter's cinema. The films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Dariush Mehrjui have garnered international fame for their artistry and humanist vision -- and their success has doubtless encouraged moderate Iranian president Mohammed Khatami to seek further cultural ties with the US and the West. That success has also prompted Iran to relax its strictures on filmmakers. To judge by the eight examples showing in the current "New Films from Iran" series at the Museum of Fine Arts, the results so far are positive but mixed.

Ebrahim Hatami-kia's The Glass Agency (1997; screens November 20 at 8 p.m.) is that rare delight, the Iranian action thriller: part Rambo, part Dog Day Afternoon, though with a far lower body count (one, from natural causes). Abbas, a veteran from the Iran-Iraq war, needs an urgent operation in London to remove a piece of life-threatening shrapnel. His doctor instructs him in the meantime to avoid stress, which doesn't stop his former commanding officer Haj from taking a travel agency hostage when it balks at issuing him a ticket. Suspenseful and illuminating when not confusing, Agency is genre filmmaking at its best and strangest -- entertaining and politically instructive, conventionally familiar and exotically transformed.

The plight of war veterans is just one controversial subject Iranian censors have been easing up on. Another is that egregious bugbear of this patriarchal culture, the rights of women. So it's regrettable that The May Lady (1997; November 13 at 8:15 p.m.), by Iran's most distinguished woman director, Rakshan Bani-Etemad, is a pretentious, self-indulgent trifle. In keeping with the tradition of Kiarostami's self-reflexivity, if not his lucid simplicity, this is a film within a film: a documentary director works on a film about exemplary Iranian mothers even as she struggles with being the single mother of a spoiled teenage son. Grave issues -- the repression of women, the disparities of class, and, again, the after-effects of the recent war -- submerge beneath self-searching voiceovers.

To evade censorship, Iranian filmmakers often feature pre-pubescent protagonists, and so Iran has come up with some of the finest children's movies of recent years. The formula of resourceful waif at odds with a callous society that worked so well in Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon falls short in Abolfazl Jalili's Don (1998; December 11 at 8:15 p.m.). Despite its Kafka-esque premise -- a poor boy without identity papers seeking help from various social agencies -- Don aspires to pseudo-cinéma-vérité and dawdles into a dreary kind of after-school TV special.

Not so The Traveller from the South (1997; November 21 at 4 p.m.), the touching and sly debut from Parviz Shahbazi (co-writer of The White Balloon). Twelve-year-old Reza is the title character en route from the sticks of Khoozestan to enjoy the holidays in Teheran. On the train he encounters an elderly woman determined to fly to Germany to visit the son she hasn't seen in years. Fate -- orchestrated by Shahbazi to seem like happenstance -- draws them closer. She breaks her glasses and has a heart attack, and Reza finds he must forgo his vacation to keep his new friend alive. Simple rather than sentimental, Traveller argues that fellowship and compassion prevail. Such is the case on the screen at any rate, and if these films have their way, perhaps in the realm of world politics as well.