Again about Gaav

(video authored by Firouzan Films)

The video above takes a scene from Gaav and replaces the dialog with a fake one. You could say that it looks funny while the movie is too tragic to make fun of it; but this video is emphasizing a political level in a movie with so many levels of understanding.

And it is a political level in Gaav, no doubt about it: think only about the menacing apparitions of the robbers from the neighboring village, and the revenge incursions: they are the robbers, we are only protecting our assets and lives; it sound very Mid East indeed.

Dariush Mehrjui returned to Iran after studying philosophy at UCLA and started to make movies. It was in the sixties, Iran was under Shah's regime, and Mehrjui was one of the guys from the westernized elite. So you could expect from him movies within some American standards.

Well, Gaav, made by Mehrjui in 1969, is very far from any American artistic frame. You could think at Italian Neorealism and French Avant-Garde. I would rather say Pasolini: Gaav calls Pasolini's works in mind. However, beyond any comparison, for a Westernized viewer the subject is so Iranian specific that the typical reaction would be stupor. And to say Iranian specific is actually misleading! A remote primitive village where a symbolic story takes place. Gaav has the structure of a ballade. Think at Parajanov! It is made with extreme simplicity and economy: things happen just because that's the way they should happen, reasonable explanations are useless.

No wonder Gaav was banned immediately by Shah's censors: how to allow a movie about an Iranian village so far from modernity? The movie was smuggled in 1972 and presented at Venice at the Mostra. Without subtitles. No need of them, anyway: the images, and that unique rhythm as of a ballade were speaking for themselves.

Mehrjui went on making movies. He left later Iran, for France, he made movies there. And after some years he came back to Iran, for homesickness. He's been going on with making movies ever since.

They say Ayatollah Komeini renounced to ban movies in Iran after watching Gaav - I don't know whether it's true, but, if it is, it means that the Ayatollah had a great taste! Because it's much easier to be revolted by the movie! The subject is as simple as it can be: there is a village, poor and primitive, Hassan is the only one possessing a cow in the village, the cow dies, Hassan gets mentally insane.

Is Hassan mad? Well, obviously. A man who believes that he is no more himself, but his cow, that's madness on all accounts.

Madness? Hassan was living in his own universe ignoring the real world. But here's the point: Hassan had always lived in his own universe - he and his cow. A whole system of memories: events lived together. Natural phenomenons lived together and having a particular significance for them: a whole system of codes and signals. Was it full moon? It meant the cow was thirsty.

This universe could not disappear once the cow was no more. The memories were still in place. The codes and signals were still in place. Was it full moon? It meant the cow was still thirsty.

So Hassan was just defending now this universe of him; only his universe was no more fit with the world. Hence, the madness.

Usually, when the beloved one is no more, the survivor is tempted to imagine that the other is still somewhere, not far. You go to the cemetery and speak to your beloved one, who is buried there. Hassan was trying something more forceful: to imagine that he, Hassan was somewhere, not far, and that the cow was here, in his body, instead of him! I know how it sounds, but it was Hassan's way to keep his universe.

Meanwhile life was going on in this village. A bunch of clay houses surrounding a small dirty pool. Old men chatting at some kind of a tea house, old women attending silently the daily events and waiting for the outcome, the village idiot tortured by kids for mere distraction, the nightly incursions of neighboring villagers: just a small closed universe around a small dirty pond.

Faced with the sudden madness of Hassan, the community comes to help, with great kindness and patience, to discover that help is sometimes useless and that kindness and patience ultimately have limits.

A tragic ballade telling us that some things happen just because that's their way to happen and nobody could change anything.


(Iranian Film and Poetry)