There could be but one reason that Maryam — which opens at the Coolidge Corner this Friday — was rescued from the indie elephant graveyard: post–September 11 relevance. Someone is hoping this klunky, obviously fictional work about a family of Iranian-Americans scapegoated by zealous patriots during the 1979 hostage crisis will find a home in today’s "God Bless America" USA.
I watched Maryam on videocassette, and not in the best of circumstances. My Serbian-filmmaker houseguest kept urging me to abandon this work by writer/director Ramin Serry for some wine tasting. "This movie is television!" he grumbled after 15 restless minutes. "Turn off this shit!" TV it is, even though cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian lists that most cinematic of features, David Riker’s La ciudad, among his credits. Bosmajian’s visual skills can’t salvage this talky, conventional tale of what happens when a moody Iranian college student Ali (David Eckart), a convert to fundamentalism because of his adoration of the ayotollah Khomeini, arrives at the New Jersey home of his Americanized cousins.
How Americanized? "Mind if I call you Al?" asks one Jersey Iranian. "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves!" laughs another one. You don’t believe this dialogue? Neither do I. Then there’s the strained plot: this angry lad from Tehran chooses to reside with his American uncle (Shaun Toub) even though he’s certain that Uncle Darius turned in his own brother, Ali’s murdered father, to Iran’s secret police. "You don’t understand," Darius keeps moaning, but a flashback to Tehran that’s supposed to explain what really happened instead fogs everything up. Is Darius an evil fink, or a good soul much misunderstood?
Do I care? Meanwhile, racist Americans throw rocks through the windows of our Iranians. My Yugoslavian friend was wrong on one point, having predicted a romance between Ali and his American cousin Maryam (Mariam Parris). Instead of chasing chicks, he goes bonkers, and there’s some turgid melodrama involving Ali and a handgun. He races to a New York hospital to assassinate a dubious patient, the shah of Iran.
"Well, I didn’t know any of this history," my girlfriend argued — she was also watching Maryam, and struggling to be generous. But the history that’s offered here is so sketchy: we never learn what happened to the odious shah, or how the hostage crisis led to the equally odious election of Ronald Reagan.
MARK THIS ESSENTIAL LOCAL HAPPENING in your calendar: the Filmmakers Open Studios April 27 and 28, an eclectic free-for-all celebration organized by the Filmmakers Collaborative and spread through Boston, Allston, Brighton, Brookline, Cambridge, Newton, Watertown, Somerville, and Waltham. I can’t do better than the succinct official description: "Come meet a wide variety of our community’s acclaimed filmmakers, tour production facilities, try out some classes, screen recent work, attend panel discussions, and learn about the inner workings of filmmakers and production houses. Animation, Audio, Commercial, Documentary, Experimental, Feature, New Media, Mixed Form — it’s all here and it’s FREE."
It’s for people involved with production, and also for the film curious. Open houses everywhere! Last year, I headed into Watertown, watched serious anthropological work produced by the Center for Independent Documentary, then drove into Waltham for a cool afternoon of pixilation and animation among the hipsters at Moody Station Studios. I’ll head out again this year, who knows where? Visit www.filmmakerscollab.org for information, times, and dozens of locales.
IT’S TAKEN A FEW MONTHS since the death of filmmaker and Harvard professor Richard P. Rogers (1944-2001) for those who knew him well, and grieve his passing, to feel up to mounting a proper memorial film festival. Now, Dick Rogers is getting the thoughtful, thorough tribute that he deserves, at the Harvard Film Archive April 19 and 20. The weekend begins Friday at 4 p.m. with an informal convocation of friends and collaborators and ends Saturday at 8 p.m. with a screening of his best-known work and only dramatic feature, A Midwife’s Tale (1996). Author William Kennedy will be among those discussing a trio of Rogers’s works Friday at 8 p.m., among them "William Kennedy’s Albany" (1992). My personal recommendation: Pictures from a Revolution (1991), Saturday at 2:30, Rogers’s compelling look at life in Nicaragua 10 years after the Sandinista victory. It was co-directed by his Harvard colleague and friend Alfred Guzzetti, and by the great photojournalist Susan Meiselas, Dick’s true love.
Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com.
