Noon o goldoon

It is true that from a purely technical perspective, the freeze frame at the end of this film is quite revolutionary. A lot of viewers have expressed some positive comments about it. Hence, it would not be an understatement to call it one of the best moments in the history of cinema. However, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf goes much more beyond this accomplishment as 'A moment of innocence' attempts to recreate an important event of the past in present times for future generations using existential themes and film making process. As a young man, while protesting against Shah's regime, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf had stabbed a police man. Although he chose an autobiographical episode which occurred many years ago, there has been no attempt made by Makhmalbaf to glorify neither violence nor revolutionary ideology. It appears as if everybody has become more compassionate including the young actor chosen to represent Makhmalbaf. This pacifist strategy brings everybody connected to the film to the conclusion that violence is no solution if the world needs to be changed. It is only through love can somebody aspire to change the world.

This is the greatest among the dozen or so Makhmalbaf titles I have seen. I was stunned that a movie so thematically complex (politics, history, redemption, etc.) can be conveyed with a superb lightness of touch. When you watch it, you really feel like you're watching a comedy. Only gradually does the movie reveal its many layers, culminating in a final freeze-frame that might be the BEST in all of cinema. More people should watch this movie! (It's certainly a lot more fun than anything by Abbas Kiarostami - a man who is more of a moral philosopher than a film-maker per se).

From what I've seen of Iranian Cinema, it seems to be that it is simultaneously simple and extremely complex. Simple in the way they capture real life moments, or simply cinematography-wise. Things look exactly how they would look in real life, the directors struggle is not to give reality another layer but to show it exactly like it is. Complex because it operates on so many levels. In "A Moment of Innocence", we talk about the meta-comment on cinema and its attempt to recreate reality, how we perceive our memories and how we would prefer real life to be like. The two main characters and their "young" counterparts are very elaborate, we get to know how their beliefs differ, how closely they resemble each other and what their goals become once they start to understand the way others think.

Beautiful imagery that transports us to the streets of Iran and its snowy roads, fantastic music and a brilliant ending that leaves us glued to the screen.

The Iranian cinema is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all national cinemas. Though it owes much to the development of Italian neo-realism, the Iranian cinema today is not just an extension of its predecessor's concerns about cinematic truth but a formal inquiry of the nature of cinema and the "truth" that lies within and outside of art. Jacques Rivette's groundbreaking "L'amour fou" already sets the stage in 1968 when he investigated the symbiotic relationship betwen art and life by using two different film stocks, 16 and 35 mm., to represent "reality" as it unfolds in front and behind the camera respectively.

In Moshen Makhmalbaf's 1996 masterpiece "A Moment of Innocence" twenty years separates a key moment in time and the recreation of it. The incident occurred when Makhmalbaf was only a youth who participated in an anti-Shah demonstration which led to the stabbing of a policeman and his imprisonment for the next five years. In an attempt to recapture this moment Makhmalbaf decides to a make a film within a film casting all the original participants (including the policeman) to play themselves as mentors to their younger selves, (i.e., actors) guiding and instructing them in the making of this "fictional" documentary.

It is not surprising that non-professional actors are employed here to both maintain a semblance of reality and to keep cinematic distortion at bay. But paradoxically, the young non-professional actors chosen to play Makhmalbaf and the policeman of their youth are as similar as they are dissimilar from their counterparts, thus, setting the stage for exploring the many tensions that exist between past and present, art and life, cinema and reality. This type of casting not only blurs the line between fiction and reality but also the distinction between documentary and narrative filmmaking.

The preoccupation with the phenomenological aspects of the cinema is as much the focus of this work as is the dramatization of the event leading up to the pivotal moment, then and now, reconstructed as a memory film as well as a product of the filmmaker's imagination to help correct an incident that only becomes clear to everyone involved after twenty years have elapsed. This celebrated moment which occurs at the end of film effectively captures the past by placing it in the present context much as if past and present suddenly converge and share the same space and time, thereby allowing us to see loss and recovery unfold simultaneously. That lost moment is now regained twenty years later through art's ability to heal and transform Makhmalbaf and his crew--thus altering the "reality" of life. The final shot is both life-affirming and referential because it so eloquently evokes the cinema's first prominent use of the freeze frame in Truffaut's "400 Blows"--if only to remind us just how far the cinema has come along. Like Truffaut's autobiographical based character Antoine Doinel the cinema has indeed grown up.

Though Mohsen Makhmalbaf eventually established a reputation as one of Iran's foremost filmmakers from the late 1980s, his early life was tumultuous: when he was 17, he stabbed a police officer at a protest against the Shah's regime and spent the next four years in prison, only being released after the Shah's overthrow. His 1996 film NUN VA GULDOON ("Bread and Flowerpot", released in the English-speaking world as "A Moment of Innocence") looks back at this episode from his youth, attempting to jointly evoke both the red-hot passion against political injustice of a young man and his older, wiser understanding that such clumsy violence was hardly a productive way to solve the world's problems.

The result is intricately constructed as a film-within-a-film. As it opens, we see the now 40-year-old policeman (Mirhadi Tayebi) visiting Tehran to ask Makhmalbaf for a part in one of his films to make up for the stabbing two decades before. Makhmalbaf, playing himself, decides to make a film loosely based on the stabbing. He chooses a young man (Ali Bakhsi) to play his younger self, and he then asks the policeman to choose an actor as the young version of himself. The policeman, who has a thuggish look and is bitter about never being offered parts in films besides villain ones, chooses a handsome guy to represent himself, but he is then overruled by the filmmaker who chooses a much more boyish-looking and vulnerable young man (Ammar Tafti), emphasizing just how young both Makhmalbaf and the policemen were at the time. This layer of NUN VA GULDOON broadly pokes fun at what Makhmalbaf's life had become after his rise to fame in Iran, having to endlessly deal with ordinary people who fancied themselves actors and were desperate to appear on screen. Much of this part of the film was shot concurrently with his effort SALAAM CINEMA, which is entirely about the film casting process.

Makhmalbaf and the policemen begin coaching the actors playing their younger selves and we see those young people beginning to act their roles, as well as a young lady (Maryam Mohamadamini) playing a girl that the policeman was in love with at the time. In a magical realist fashion, the layers of the film shift in the middle of scenes: one moment we are watching actors play roles, the next moment it is as if the viewer is really seeing what happened in the mid-1970s. It is this magical intertwining of past and present that made NUN VA GULDOON such a powerful experience for me. The ending, which has been fairly praised as "the greatest freeze-frame since Truffaut's LES 400 COUPS", is just as much a work of art in itself as any still from a Tarkovsky film.

Except for Makhmalbaf himself and Moharram Zaynalzadeh in a supporting role as his cameraman, none of the people in the film were trained actors. With Mirhadi Tayebi as the policeman, this is a weak part of the film: he delivers his lines in a stilted way and it is hard to suspend disbelief. With the others, however, Makhmalbaf made a smart choice, as Ammar Tafti and Ali Bakhsi are convincing in their roles, but there is still a youthful awkwardness and authenticity about them that would might have been lost if they were professionals. Most dazzling of all, however, is Maryam Mohamadamini as the love interest. She's a magnetic screen presence, and as the film leads to its incredible ending, she deftly conveys so much of the suspense and drama through gestures alone. It's a huge loss to cinema that she apparently never acted again.

In spite of the film's limitations in terms of some of the acting and the limited resources Makhmalbaf had to work with when making the film, I found NUN VA GULDOON a moving film and that last freeze-frame literally breathtaking. I'd recommend this to any lover of cinema.