Modest Reception - Die Macht des Geldes

An urban couple (Mani Haghighi & Taraneh Alidoosti) who may be husband & wife, or Brother & sister, or something else; drive around in remote mountainous villages in Iran distributing bags of money to people with no apparent motive or explanation. In some cases, in return for the money they request unusual, and at times humiliating and painful deeds.

Paziraie Sadeh (Modest Reception) is a major departure from Haghighi's last work Canaan which was a mainstream story driven film. Paziraie Sadeh is obviously meant to provoke and challenge. It is a film that can be, and will be, interpreted in a variety of ways. Whether Haghighi had a specific message to convey with this film is not clear.

Paziraie Sadeh may not be to everybody's liking but it is a very well acted film which will challenge many of our conceptions.

I tend to like Iranian cinema, but this tale of an urban middle class couple (Kaveh, played by Mani Haghighi, who also wrote and directed the movie, and Leyla, played by the lovely Taraneh Alidoosti, who has starred in several films of director Asghar Farhadi), going through the impoverished countryside, throwing bags of money to poor peasants, seems contrived and pretentious. Their motives are never made clear, in fact neither it is whether they are in fact a couple or a brother and a sister. Leyla comes across as a particularly loathsome character, always irritable for no reason, not a mean feat as she is portrayed by the lovely Alidoosti.

This is a one idea movie, and a confused idea at that. If the best Iranian cinema is characterized by its humanistic, compassionate view towards its poor subjects, this movie is instead awfully and painfully condescending towards them. Add to that the incredibly pretentious and unbelievable dialogue, and this is an almost unwatchable film.

This was by far the best film I saw in the Berlin Film Festival this year, which surprised me given the tense situation in the country. Like the much lauded 'A Separation', it's chock full of allusions to the unique state the people in Iran are living in, but instead of veiling this in a character study, Mani Haghighi creates (and acts) an absurd world.

Given the panache of the story, it comes almost as a shock that 'Modest Reception' was screened in the Tehran Film festival: a rich city couple confront (and confound) a number of poor border-region mountain folks, offering them bags of money in return for increasingly humiliating actions. Throughout the film, it is unclear why they are doing this, and even the final explication remains far from satisfactory; what is evident though is that they are at odds with their own lives, and use the situation to wield absolute power over the people they meet, a behavior that switches to its exact opposite at the final climax, which somewhat redeems their earlier behavior.

Having been in Iran, I would say that it helps to know the country from the inside rather than news reports. If you only know these, this film will take you completely by surprise, and you'll find it hard to understand the sub-tones. As Haghighi said during Q&A upon the question if the film had any political message: 'You know, I think everything has a political message these days'. Let it suffice to say that there is a fundamental class division in Iran (as elsewhere) between city traders (or 'basaris', for which the leading couple may stand) and rural or migrating laborers (for which their various encounters may stand for). Afghan refugees, crooks, hermits, village teachers and impoverished soldiers feature among the types presented here, all of them acting with a humility towards the arrogance of the couple that may symbolize the superceding power of money over status; that may be why the movie wasn't touched too much by censors in spite of its critical tone. However, Haghighi also admitted that the absurd story was intended to deliberately mislead any expectations by authorities and audiences alike. That may also explain why the film moves at a very fast pace and features an acid jazz theme.

'Modest Reception' is a baffling mix of social criticism and sardonic comedy, defying any expectations on Iranian cinema, and as far away from Kiarostami as you can possibly imagine.

A Tehran couple Leyla and Kaveh drive about a mountain region somewhere in Iran and offer bags of money to the poor people they encounter in return for these folks carrying out actions that increase in inappropriateness.

The thing I thing that struck me most about Modest Reception was the way in which it went against my pre-conceived ideas about Iran. It surprised me that a film with such immoral central characters would have been permitted to have been made there in the first place. My ignorance I admit. Secondly, the way the female character Leyla was portrayed was much unexpected. She was very liberated and assertive. She was the one who did the driving, she was more than a match for her husband in the fiery insults and she looked quite atypical in her cool little feminine woollen hat. My ignorance at work once again obviously. But it just goes to show that the perception of Iran from a western perspective can be somewhat skewered.

The star and director Mani Haghighi said that there was no real message to the film and that people have interpreted all kinds of allegorical meanings into the narrative; which he found a little tedious. It is an odd film and I certainly felt I was probably missing something, in terms of overall understanding. But perhaps there isn't as much to understand as you imagine. Maybe it is simply a strange and surreal tale about a couple who decide to rock the boat a bit to see what will happen.