Iranian cinema rewards us with a new gem. Shown at the last Cannes Film Festival in ” In some perspective “, Annals of Tehran paints a portrait of nine ordinary individuals from the capital who are faced with an event that disrupts their daily lives.
So the young father comes to announce the birth of his son to the registry office. She wants to call him David! Impossible, that would be promote foreign culture “. Then endless negotiations begin with the zealous bureaucrat. Later, the eight-year-old girl is forced to try on the veil that she will have to wear at the beginning of school. No matter how much she protests, her mother does not want to hear anything…
A unique device
The uplifting skits thus follow each other to condemn the absurd, oppressive, Kafkaesque situations in which the characters, who are about to defend their point of view in the tragicomic mode, before the representative of the struggle for power.
We are struck by the relentless clarity of this ensemble picture, funny but desperate, which draws its power from its unique device: each segment, a sequence shot on average eight minutes, is filmed with a fixed camera framing the tortured faces of the protagonists. , without ever showing their partners who symbolize the voice of the system.
” The beauty of resistance is finding a way around the rules and the authority that made them, but that takes a lot of energy and cunning. », Explain two directors and screenwriters, Ali Asgari, 41 years old, and Alireza Khatami, 44 years old.
They continue: “ Every story happened to one of our loved ones, parents or friends. They were fictionalized to make them even more grotesque. Some win, some lose. But they are never victims. No regime can have absolute control over its citizens. »
The spiritual sons of the Dardenne brothers, both Alis, as they call themselves, signed an eminently political manifesto. “ We are currently living in a transitional time, it is urgent to say things directly, not to be afraid and to demand our rights. »
By Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, with Bahman Ark. Released this Wednesday March 13th.