Rosewater (***)

You might not expect a comedian-turned-TV host, even the host of a news parody show, to make his directorial debut with a drama about an journalist arrested by the Iranian government. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show played an odd, indirect role in the story of Maziar Bahari, whose memoir was adapted by Stewart. Being an American film, it’s almost all in English, though in real life, presumably, most of the speaking would have been in Farsi.

Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a Newsweek reporter covering the 2009 elections in Iran, was arrested and accused of spying. His interrogator relied partly on an interview Bahari had given to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in which Jones had asked, in the show’s mock serious way, if Bahari were a spy. (Modestly, Stewart doesn’t refer to the show by name.)

The film depicts Bahari’s reporting on the election and, primarily, his subsequent detention and interrogation. (For the squeamish, the violence is fairly minimal.) Though Stewart briefly shows us scenes involving the interrogator and his superior, almost all of the movie is from Bahari’s point of view, understandable given that it’s based on a memoir. This means, though, that the biggest mysteries — did the Iranians truly think Bahari was a spy, what did they expect to accomplish by holding him, and so on — remain so. Instead, the film is a window into the mind of the captive, wondering what he should or can do to save himself. Stewart uses flashbacks and imagined discussions between Bahari and his late father and sister, who had also been held captive, both to depict Bahari’s backstory and to reveal his thoughts while in solitary confinement. At the time of his captivity, the Iranian-born Bahari was based in London, where his wife was pregnant with his first child.

Stewart’s debut is an entirely credible effort, well done but without that many surprises, kind of what you might expect from a film on this subject, if not from this particular writer-director.


IMDb link

viewed 11/10/14 7:00 pm at AMC Loews Cherry Hill and posted 11/10/14

The Past (****)

The famous William Faulkner quote (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) applies here. Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), an Iranian, has returned to France to finalize his divorce from Marie (Bérénice Bejo), a French woman with two daughters from an earlier relationship. Without wanting to, he inevitably becomes involved with the troubles Marie is having with the older daughter, who seems hostile to her mother’s new boyfriend for reasons that aren’t clear, and that prove not to be what they seem.

Most remarkable is the construction of the plot; its cleverness won’t surprise anyone who’s seen writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s previous film, the Oscar-winning A Separation. This French-language film was not nominated for the foreign-language film Oscar, but is equally rewarding. (Given its theme of impending divorce, it’s a thematic sequel, though the story is completely different.) Farhadi lets the truth come out like pieces in a puzzle, revealed in a series of confessions until what remains is the unknowable future. At first showing us the story through Ahmad’s eyes, Farhadi also shifts viewpoints, to the mother, to the daughters, and ultimately to the boyfriend.

This drama constructed like a thriller ends with an emotional question that a plot twist cannot answer but is nonetheless haunting.

IMDb link

viewed 1/30/14 7:00 at Ritz 5 and posted 2/26/14