Here’s a film that asks, in the vein of another’s title: did you wonder who fired the gun? Yet in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which is set concurrently against Iran’s Jina (Women, Life, Freedom) protests, the question’s sarcastic rather than interrogative. This gun is not literal and corporeal, but metaphorical and deadly, its firer the collective will of hundreds of women who cannot abide the country’s theocratic regime and morality police. There’s no doubting the film’s own cogently didactic thrust, either.
And that latter fact is what distinguishes its success: the message goes down better, or is in this case enhanced, by being enwrapped in a scorching thriller. At Cannes, buzz swept the festival following its pre-premiere buyers’ screenings––a distinct, if of course discerning audience. This finds a particular reflection in its UK distributor: Lionsgate, rather than an arthouse specialist, means the film will run nationwide in multiplexes, with an ample exclusive window. Critics often wonder how the overriding messages of the films they review might be amplified, and for a piece of renegade Iranian cinema, its situation is unprecedented.
This reviewing approach seems most pertinent because aspects of Rasoulof’s plot, while well and fluidly told, fade when assessing Sacred Fig‘s real-world impact and associations––not to mention the state persecution he’s faced for making it and previous works (stripped of his passport, he managed to flee Iran, and is reported as residing safely in Germany). But what we have is a domestic thriller initially consigned to the domicile before the impact of its primary, female characters shatter those confines, taking it to the desert-like ex-urban outskirts and the hypothetical beyond.
Imam (Misagh Zare), a middle-class family’s patriarch, has received a promotion to the role of investigating judge in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Court, and when faced with ratifying highly dubious sentences, his conscience is wracked. Yet his family, composed of spouse Najmeh (Soheila Golestani, an actress known for her activism) and late-teenage girls Reyzan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), begin offering their support for, and in the latter two cases, participate in the Jina movement named for the Kurdish middle name of Mahsa Amini, whose death in police custody after she was reprimanded for not wearing the hijab sparked these revolts. His role at the highest levels of state apparatus turns him from a respected patriarch into their symbolic enemy.
Those events of 2022-23 are conveyed via highly graphic, real-life smartphone videos of police violence and civil unrest, whose directness and power honestly dwarf Sacred Fig‘s far more speculative designs. But in a cross-genre, shape-shifting manner that isn’t tonally separate from fellow festival crossover Parasite, the story is accelerated when the handgun officially granted to Imam on his appointment suddenly goes missing. Revolutions, especially in their 18th- and 19th-century form, always saw the seizing of the state’s military firepower, important for its innate threat and potential for deterrence as much as how it could eventually be deployed.
My absolute trust in this film started to waver roughly around this moment, my impressed nodding crumpling into a “Really?” facial expression. You may’ve accurately heard about car chases, but I should report that my Locarno audience genuinely laughed at the farcical nature of the blocking throughout the final act. But Rasoulof ultimately succeeds because he is at least one step ahead of us. The mere impact is palpable: that his movie stumbles from lucidity into ugly chaos and spontaneous fight-or-flight behaviors is right. A cool, all-seeing distance isn’t appropriate for dramatizing this moment in modern world history; we need to feel our ribs jolt, hopefully beckoning us to safety, before we can even think.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig screened at Locarno Film Festival and will be released by Neon.
The post Locarno Review: The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a Shape-Shifting Thriller Where Iranian Protests Manifest in the Family Home first appeared on The Film Stage.
