The 4 central characters in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” a gripping, beautifully acted drama from the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, are launched with an virtually ceremonial deliberation. First up is Iman (Misagh Zare), a lawyer who has simply been appointed to the high-risk place of investigating choose; armed with the information, and a handgun issued for his safety, he drives to a mosque and spends a couple of moments in prayer. (Is he thanking God or pleading for mercy?) A hushed solemnity persists later at dwelling, the place Iman discusses issues together with his spouse, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), in conspiratorial whispers. Within the morning, we meet their daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), a delicate twenty-one-year-old, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), a mischievous, sharp-witted teen-ager; ultimately, Najmeh says cryptically, the 2 of them will not need to share a bed room. Solely later that day will we see all 4 relations collectively, at a restaurant, the place Iman shares the ostensibly excellent news in full.
Rasoulof doesn’t simply lay out a premise in these early scenes; he presents the household as a rigidly hierarchical and compartmentalized unit. Iman, walled off by work, is a largely absent authoritarian; Najmeh nervously acts as a conduit, passing alongside obscure data from husband to kids. As for Rezvan and Sana, their cautious glances sign their rising exasperation with their dad and mom’ guidelines, that are solely about to accentuate. Given the risks of Iman’s new place, the women should take particular care to not hurt his popularity, which implies minding who they hang around with, abiding by the hijab legal guidelines, and protecting low social-media profiles. Their mom warns, “You should be irreproachable.”
With “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Rasoulof has composed an epic of reproach. Iman’s promotion coincides with the Girl, Life, Freedom motion that ignited in 2022, after Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Iranian Kurdish girl, was arrested for allegedly violating the hijab legal guidelines and died within the custody of Iran’s morality police. As Rezvan and Sana watch occasions unfold on their telephones and the information, Rasoulof makes their horror ours; he splices in precise footage from the protests, together with acts of utmost police brutality. Earlier than lengthy, the political will turn out to be acutely private. Rezvan’s shut buddy Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) is critically injured by police at a college rally, and the 2 sisters bravely attempt to assist her. Iman, in the meantime, is tormented in his new job, which requires him to unexpectedly course of numerous new arrest instances by the day.
Rasoulof’s script would possibly nicely have included a scene or two exhibiting Iman’s soiled work in motion, reasonably than consigning his ethical dilemma to maybe one too many soul-searching showers. Even so, the director is shrewd to zero in on the household dwelling—a psychological warfare zone the place secrets and techniques fester behind locked doorways and practically each room turns into a hiding place. The presence of a gun explicitly marks “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” as a home thriller—a nuclear-family noir. However even with out a single weapon, I believe, Rasoulof’s twisty story would suck us in. The storm brewing within the streets finds an equal fury indoors, the place Rezvan and Sana—and, in her personal approach, Najmeh—start mounting their very own acts of rise up.
After I first noticed “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” at this 12 months’s Cannes Movie Pageant, I broke down weeping at a scene by which Najmeh ministers, tenderly, to Rezvan’s wounded buddy. She doesn’t very similar to Sadaf, whom she considers a nasty affect, however beneath these agonizing circumstances the imperatives of fundamental human decency win out. Rasoulof doesn’t fake {that a} single good deed will essentially change somebody’s world view; if something, the trauma that Najmeh witnesses solely hardens her disdain for political protest. The extra resonant level is that this girl’s compassion—laid naked in unflinching closeup, as Najmeh tweezes buckshot from Sadaf’s face—carries its personal unignorable ethical weight. Her decency is not going to be forgotten, least of all by these of us watching.
Mine weren’t the one tears shed at that Cannes première; for some, the crying started earlier than the film did. Watching Rasoulof ascend the pageant’s red-carpeted steps, it was surreal to recall that he had been on the run a mere two weeks earlier, having fled his nation to keep away from an eight-year jail sentence. The story of his daring escape, which he shared with the New York Instances, is gripping sufficient to furnish a thriller by itself, although any correct account would start years earlier, when Rasoulof grew to become considered one of Iran’s most important dissident filmmakers, with fiercely confrontational dramas like “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” (2013) and “A Man of Integrity” (2017). All through his profession, he has repeatedly been arrested and banned from filmmaking. “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” like his earlier characteristic, “There Is No Evil” (2020), was shot clandestinely.
Given the onscreen proof, a corrosive story of secrets and techniques and lies can solely have benefitted from being made beneath such covert, intensely pressurized circumstances. There’s a unprecedented launch of pressure when, late into the story, Rasoulof springs his characters from their claustrophobic dwelling environs and sends them, led by Iman, to a distant hideaway within the mountains. What ensues is a sequence of astonishments—a flexing of muscle tissue not usually related to our too-sedate conceptions of Iranian auteur cinema. There’s a automotive chase, an on-camera interrogation, a betrayal of astounding cruelty, and, lastly—in a labyrinthine climax that brings basic Westerns to thoughts—a tragic turning of the tables.
Do the blunt-force closing passages stretch credulity? Maybe so, although I believe Rasoulof means for us to really feel the pressure—and to push previous it, right into a realm someplace between realism, style, and allegory. The household on this story will be learn, on one stage, as a middle-class Iranian microcosm, by which the conflicts that come up between generations, or genders, are very a lot issues of life and dying. Beneath Rasoulof’s blistering rage erupts a wellspring of empathy: for younger girls, like Rezvan and Sana, combating to be heard, and for wives and moms, like Najmeh, collaborating in their very own oppression. Empathy, too, for husbands and fathers like Iman, sacrificing their households on the altar of an unjust regime; the unyielding grip of the patriarchy is their tragedy, too. ♦
