A MOMENT OF INNOCENCE (NUN VA GOLDOON)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten New Yorker Films/MK2 Productions Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf Writer: Mohsen Makhmalbaf Cast: Ali Bakhsi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Maryann Mohamadamini, Ammar Tafti, Mirhadi Tayebi, Moharram, Zaynalzadeh
Surely you've had at least one moment in your life that you consider one of consummate meaning, that gives essence to your being and which you mull over in the mind and in your dreams. Iran's great director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, had one single particular which impacted so greatly on his life that the incident never left his consciousness. With the resources at his command, however, he was able to do with this moment what most of us can only dream of accomplishing. He dramatized the episode for the motion picture screen, shaping the affair in a way that would be not only entertaining for people of various cultures but would cause them to stop and think, "If only I did things a little bit differently, how my personal history would have changed!"
Makhmalbaf was, like many artists of his time, opposed to the Iranian regime under the Shah, a government which he believed ignored the authentically pious identity of its people and sided far too greatly with the cultures of the West, particularly the United States. As a form of protest in 1976, he tried to disarm a policeman, using a young woman to distract the officer, and in the process stabbed the poor man and wound up with a five-year sentence in jail, where he was tortured and his life threatened. In 1996, when "A Moment of Innocence" (known in Farsi as "Nun va Goldoon") was filmed, he hired actors to re-enact that situation using the actual officer whom he victimized twenty years earlier to direct a younger version of himself! Now, there's a concept that would have pleased the great Sicilian playwright, Luigi Pirandello, whose staged works questioned the nature of reality and pondered the relationship of art to life.
Given the nature of the human beast to forgive especially when there is some reward attached to absolution, the officer in question has no desire for vengeance against his attacker but is far more absorbed in training a young actor to come across to the movie audience as a dashing young man. It's no wonder, therefore, that when asked to choose from a line- up of 17-year-old applicants for the job, he picks the handsomest lad rather than the best performer. When his choice is vetoed by the director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (playing himself), he stalks off angrily but is drawn quickly back to the studio as his vanity gets the better of him.
Meanwhile Makhmalbaf, coaching the younger version of himself, instructs the 17-year-old about the ironic nature of his confrontation with the police officer. He had used an attractive young woman to distract the victim, sending her each day to ask for the time or for directions, so that the officer thought the woman was showing a romantic interest in him. The policeman was determined to give a flower to the woman but the thought of doing so made his hand tremble. How heartbreaking to find out that this lovely person draped in a black chodor was simply using him, setting him up for a tragedy!
Since art is never the same as life, things do not work out in the photographic re-enactment quite as they did twenty years previous. In fact a far warmer turn of events transpires in the present, one if, hit come to pass in '76, would have changed Makhmalbaf's life significantly and might even have led to choose a career other than film-making.
For lovers of Pirandello-like films and for people who never heard of the Sicilian dramatist but who like to ponder what-if's of human existence, "A Moment of Innocence" is a moment of meta-cinematic intensity. If you had seen that director's "The Silence" immediately preceding as I did, you'd not have believed the two movies were by the same fellow, as "Innocence" accommodates a less meditative, wittier, lighter touch with quite a bit more depth of plot--involving other people in the director's life whom he takes his protege to meet and with whose daughter the young colleague is about to recapitulate the older man's experience. The most humorous scene involves a tailor who is fashioning a general's costume for the would-be cop, a man who looks with fondness to some of the great American films of the past like "Spartacus" and the works of John Ford. Weaving memories of the past into an artistic re-creation, the Iranian director scores with a subtle, diverting, and many-tiered comedy-drama.
Not Rated. Running Time: 74 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
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