Updates, Live: Jafar Panahi: Crimson Gold (2003)

Art is much higher than politics... You never say what's wrong or right. We just show the problems.
(Jafar Panahi)

It starts like a film noir, a scene of robbery with an absurd outcome, excellently shot, with an incredible rhythm, with guts, and one could expect the movie will go on this way, kind of Quentin Tarantino on the steroids. Actually this starting scene, coming again at the end, is the moment of explosion in the story.

Crimson Gold (طلای سرخ Talaye Sorkh), released in 2003, with Jafar Panahi as director and Abbas Kiarostami as screenwriter; it is the second movie of this tandem that I've watched (the other was The White Balloon). Two films showing a society that rejects the people who don't fit in the canons. In The White Balloon it's the Afghan boy (only there the idea is subtly hidden up to the end). Here in Crimson Gold, it's Hussein, the pizza delivery guy, who is played by a non-professional, Hossain Emadeddin. Like his personage, he is in real life a pizza delivery man. Like his personage, he is under medication for a form of schizophrenia. His performance is remarkable. Looking always like he's carrying all his household with him everywhere he goes, while able exactly this way to induce the feeling that he is his own guy. Silent, quiet, apparently in total selfcontrol, while able exactly this way to communicate to us his terrible tensions that boil in himself and make him a walking time-bomb.

As a schizophrenic, Hussein sees the society through his own mirror (and the idea of shooting him so often through the shield of his motorbike is genial). Actually, that shield acts both ways: Hussein is in turn the perfect mirror of the society surrounding him. It is a society sick of the same schizophrenia, an absurd universe where everybody is hostile to all the others, parents are denouncing their children, police arrest anybody for anything, simple people float freely toward petty crime, rich people are surrounded by a richness that is absurd by lack of meaning.

Each sequence of the movie calls for a moment of disruption, you cannot stand to such absurdity, you have to explode, and there are small disruptions all along, culminating with the big one, the failed robbery.

It's not only about Iran, as many reviewers consider. This film is a metaphor, and a metaphor is universal. The movie is banned in Iran while its director was not allowed to enter US to assist at the screening there. Director Jafar Panahi is banned in his own country and is suspected elsewhere as coming from his own country.

The robbery scene that links the beginning and the end of the movie shows a universe that is circular with no way to escape (also in The White Balloon the first and the last scenes are the same). It's an extremely nihilistic movie: there is no superior order (cosmic or divine) to show us the way, to offer us solace, to teach us higher wisdom. The whole universe is a walking time-bomb.