All about Eve

Taking a bite of The Apple

by Peter Keough

THE APPLE, Directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. Written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. With Massoumeh Naderi, Zahra Naderi, Ghorbanali Naderi, Soghra Behrozi and Azizeh Mohamadi. A New Yorker Films release. At the Coolidge Corner.

Deceptive simplicity, the hallmark of most Iranian films, distinguishes The Apple from its opening frames. A weathered stucco wall backs a withered potted plant. A slender hand reaches through a grate with a watering can, pours, and misses the soil. The pathos lies not in the fact that the plant withers or that the hand is behind bars, but in the irrepressible impulse to restore both to life.

The hand belongs to one of two 12-year-old twin girls, Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, who made news not long ago in Teheran when neighbors' complaints spurred the authorities to investigate their living conditions. They found that the pair had been locked up by their elderly, impoverished parents for nearly their entire lives and were virtually incapable of any social interaction.

A microcosm of the plight of women in the patriarchal Iranian theocracy, perhaps -- but then so too is Samira Makhmalbaf, the 18-year-old daughter of renowned Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (he also wrote The Apple's screenplay), who transformed these blighted lives into a limpid, occasionally over-earnest, but utterly assured debut feature. Casting the actual family in her film, Makhmalbaf spins this tabloid oddity into a gently subversive fable about moribund tradition and inevitable change, about the persistence of hope and tolerance in the face of the most intransigent ignorance and oppression.

Such as the face of the twins' father, Ghorbanali Naderi, a doddering scarecrow in Coke-bottle glasses, whose obstinacy in keeping his daughters locked up springs not so much from chauvinist tyranny as from addled piety, incapacity, and low intelligence. Quoting from an old Islamic book of advice to fathers, he defends his actions to the feisty welfare woman (Azizeh Mohamadi) on his case by saying that "daughters are like flowers . . . they wither in the sun." Wrongheaded though he may be, he's more sympathetic than his wife, Soghra Behrozi; her blindness exaggerated by a chador that covers her completely, her high-pitched, viciously caviling voice sounding like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, she roundly abuses her husband, her daughters, and any outsiders who deign to interfere.

But the no-nonsense welfare woman perseveres and sets the twins free, and much of the film's magic comes from the camera's following the gawky, feral pair as they roam the streets of their neighborhood, their bewilderment graced by an otherworldly bemusement like that of Bruno S. in Werner Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser. Their socialization is not smooth -- they swipe ice cream from a tough little vendor, and their first game of hopscotch goes awkwardly, culminating with one twin delightedly smacking the head of their game instructor. Perhaps because this is a movie, though, or because Iranian children are more forgiving than their American counterparts (only a little boy who taunts them from a window with an apple held by a string seems to hold any malice), all ends happily.

For the day, at least. Makhmalbaf has a slyly compassionate eye for the delinquent parents. To compel the father to set his daughters free, the welfare worker locks him behind his own gate, giving him a saw to cut the bars if he wants to release himself. His dismal, half-hearted efforts at sawing through as he's harangued by his wife's termagant complaints are both comic and sad. When the daughters return from their adventure in the big city, they let him out themselves -- they need him to join them to go shopping for watches. And when the three set out beyond the walls of their sour little paradise together for the first time, The Apple suggests that this family, and this society, may be ripe for change.

The Apple shows its youthful hand with its touches of ingenuous symbolism and a raw narrative that strays at times from poetic cinéma-vérité to clumsy home video. Nonetheless, it is an impressive accomplishment, and a challenging one. Particularly in its final image of the blind mother, abandoned and wandering the streets alone, taunted by the same little boy with his apple. The future is hard enough for those few who have been tempted by the fruit of knowledge. What will it be for the vast majority who cannot be brought to see?