Director – Mohammad Rasoulof – 2024 – Iran, Germany, France – Cert. 15 – 167m
*****
An Iranian state functionary, married with two teenage daughters, is promoted to the position of judge at the same time as the Women, Life, Freedom protests erupt… And then, his gun goes missing at home… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 7th
A film so extraordinarily brilliant that it is almost impossible to conceive.
An opening intertitle explains the remarkable life cycle of a tree which grows on one of the southern Iranian islands. Its seeds fall onto the branches of other trees through bird droppings. The seeds then germinate, and their roots move towards the ground. When the roots reach the ground, the sacred fig tree stands on its own feet and its branches strangle the host tree.
2022. The tireless and diligent work of state functionary Iman (Missagh Zareh) has finally been rewarded; he is to be appointed a judge. In a repressive regime like Iran, that’s not a job looked upon favourably by most of the population, so his work gives him a pistol just in case he should need to defend himself or his family. At home, in the Tehran apartment where he lives with his family, he keeps the weapon in a drawer.
His wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is broadly supportive of his career and promotion. Not least because it means a bigger house (in a fortified area designated for other state employees doing equally unpopular jobs) and a bigger income. The couple need to break the news to their two teenage daughters, which because of the momentous nature and far-reaching consequences of Imam’s promotion, they do as a family night out.
Najmeh explains to their daughters, the older Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and the younger Sana (Setareh Maleki), that from now on, they need to be on their best behaviour. The family now represent the government, so they need to behave accordingly, adhering to strict Islamic dress codes, and not behave in any controversial or untoward manner. Given that the two girls are contemporary teenagers, this feels like wish fulfilment on the part of the parents. Realistically, it’s not going to happen.
Meanwhile, protests by the Women, Life, Freedom movement have erupted in the streets of Tehran. The girls have been told not to get involved, but this proves an impossible demand since Rezvan and her bestie Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), though no fault of their own, get caught up in one of the protests as they leave college premises and Sadaf gets brutally beaten by the authorities, receiving some very nasty blows in the area around one of her eyes. The two sisters smuggle the wounded Sadaf into the flat to tend to her wounds.
Teenage angst has never been like this before. The sisters now find themselves on the radical side of the social divide, with their father on the other, repressive, conservative side. The mother attempts to stand alongside her husband, but she is a mother and, as such, fiercely protective of the children who have come out of her body; like them, she is also female. She finds her position increasingly untenable.
Not that her husband is having an easy time of it. He has always prided himself on being scrupulous in his work, but with his promotion comes a massive increase in workload. Whereas before he would have had time to properly review case files of people accused of crimes, and come to a well-considered judgement, he is now being presented with case files requiring decisions so fast that he can do little more than rubber stamp imprisonment or death sentences without really knowing what the person concerned has been accused of, or how weak or strong the evidence against them.
His job, it seems, is to give his signature to condemn people to their sentence without knowing whether they are innocent or guilty. He is less than happy about this – but then, it’s his job, and he’s worked hard to get to this place, even if it turns out not to be quite what he expected.
And then, at home, the unthinkable happens. His gun is no longer in the drawer where he put it. Someone must have taken it. The only three people who could have done so are his wife and his two daughters. However, one after another, they all deny taking the gun. With the family home turned into a pressure cooker by outside events, against the backdrop of a patriarchal Islamist society that systematically tries to keep women down, any of the three could have a motive. However, each, in turn, denies removing the weapon.
In the hope of retrieving the gun and finding a resolution that restores the status quo, the increasingly desperate husband resorts to increasingly desperate measures. He calls in an interrogator to question them one by one. He takes them to the countryside home where he grew up, to a house which has cells in which he can incarcerate them until he gets an answer. One of them will tell him how she took the gun away and disposed of it by dropping it in a river, to get it out of the house, but this will turn out to be a lie.
Thus, what appears to begin as a minor family row slowly escalates into something much more far-reaching, imperceptibly turning into a tense game of cat and mouse with the husband on one side and the three women on the other. Do not think for a moment that this plays out like a dull drama: the whole thing is orchestrated with all the skill of an Argento or a Hitchcock, although neither of those directors ever made anything quite like this, with its social and political ramifications.
Much of the action takes place within the family apartment – Hitchcock, although he mostly worked with plots based around single people or couples rather than families, worked with similar restrictions of location in many of his films – although the proceedings build to a finale in an ancient labyrinth of corridors, towers and rooftops in which the man hunts the women while one of the women who has the gun in turn hunts the man.
It’s worth noting that the teenage girls are played not by teenagers but adult, although the film is so expertly cast that you will believe you are watching teenagers. The reason for that is that the director, who shot the film inside Iran in secret, smuggled himself out of the country to show the film at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. He has not gone back since, and some of his collaborators have since likewise also got out of Iran. He fears reprisals from the authorities for all those involved in making the film who remain there.
I could tell you I like this film because it bravely stands up against an impressive regime, and while that’s true, that fact, however commendable, wouldn’t of itself make me give it five stars. It earns that accolade through its understanding of the situation in which it sets its story, and the pitch perfect manner in which it almost excruciatingly slowly tightens the screw, ups the ante and ratchets up the tension until, by the end, watching the finale is almost unbearable.
If it is slow-paced in places, don’t be fooled by the long running length: the whole thing will have you on the edge of your seat for the duration. The political has become the personal, the familial, the social. Iranian cinema has often surprised and unsettled audiences, but never quite like this. Although a film specifically about the current Iranian regime, it transcends that appalling situation to say much about totalitarian regimes everywhere and the widespread repression of people who refuse in any shape or shade to conform. Quite possibly, the best film you’ll see all year.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 7th.
Trailer: