SALAAM CINEMA
A film review by Balaji
Copyright 1995 Balaji
The Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf has been asked to make a film commemorating cinema's 100 years: he begins by putting an ad in the Teheran papers for a 100 extras: 5000 people show up. The stampede scene as they break the gates and pour into the studio compound is electrifying, one of the great crowd scenes in cinema: think, perhaps, of the Odessa steps in Potemkin. An attempt at imposing order by passing out forms is soon drowned in a sea of grasping hands filling the entire screen; the sea dissolves to an ocean of heads with paper fluttering over them. Brilliant, pulse-racing film-making.
Thus begins an entertaining inquiry into the nature of cinema. Makhmalbaf, forced by events to improvise, decides to turn his screen tests into a film. The aspiring stars are asked to perform for the camera, explain why they are here, express emotion for the camera, go down under a bullet from Makhmalbaf's finger. Reality merges seamlessly with the cinematic illusion: a young blind man performs a melodrama for his screen test, and is in serious discomfort when the director asks him to remove his glasses and expose his eyes to view. It turns out his blindness was merely part of a persona he donned for his screen test. A woman claims she wished to be in a Makhmalbaf film in order to leave Iran: it will perhaps be invited to Cannes, and thus she will be reunited with her lover in Europe. However, she will not lose her dignity before the camera. Makhmalbaf instructs her to tell the camera that there are limits to what she will do to be with her lover, and then leave. So: has she now acted in a film? (This film did go to Cannes.) What is real here, what feigned? Were these directorial set pieces, or did it all "really happen" just so, under the camera's gaze? How many pairs of shades, of eyes, must be shed to arrive at an unmediated vision? Are we ever not performing? How much has cinema itself shaped how each of us views ourselves? A man appears convinced he resembles Paul Newman: under questioning he reveals he has never seen Paul Newman at all, he has just been told so by his friends. Nonetheless, that has shaped _who_he_really_is_: in his everyday persona he has acquired a strut and a pout in the manner of a screen idol.
The main event is the tussle of two women, Maryam and Farha, with Makhmalbaf himself. The discomfort of an untrained actor attempting to produce strong emotion on tap leads to genuine emotion, exposed to a pitiless camera gaze. The women soon are in passionate argument with Makhmalbaf about the artist's struggle to retain her humanity under the strenuous demands of her art; Makhmalbaf himself is shown visibly discomfited when confronted with his own manipulative torment of the women. (Or was this a role he was playing? For the movie, for himself, for the women, to elicit from them the performances he wanted?)
The startling and unique achievement of the film is to show there is high drama in the human everyday, that the variety and range of human experience can be captured in a simple unadorned cinematic look at the sensitive beauty of a human face, that there is redemption in the love of art and performance, which finally cannot be crushed, not even by the ayatollahs.
The ayatollahs of Hollywood: now, that is another story. The processing of faces, bodies, stories into the rigid strictures of the studio exec's narrow mind is exposed here, down to its fundamentalist core, by the simple magic of a camera on an ordinary human face. One plump, bespectacled Maryam, shapeless in an overcoat and chador, expressed more of the range of human experience than a dozen Julia Robertses and Tom Cruises could in a dozen lifetimes. One Makhmalbaf with a single camera captured more of the magic of cinema than the entire Spielberg galaxy.
-- Balaji
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