Khoon bazi

Bani Etemad made "Under the City's Skin" in 2001. Back there, she pointed out deep problems of the society after 1997 election. Although was mostly about the city of Tehran, it managed to bring the difficulties of living in a clerical society to the silver screen where a completely different story is going on under skin. While "Under the City's Skin" was mostly about the working class of the society, "Khoon Bazi" points on a different class. Sara and her family don't seem to have any kind of financial problems. Unlike many of the Iranian movies about the matter of addiction, this time a young girl of the upper class is facing a tragedy. She nervously watches her fiancé dancing with a doll wearing her wedding dress. Being happy of her upcoming wedding, her bipolar behavior intensifies during the journey with her mother. Mother also has a different behavior in comparison with typical Iranian women previously seen in such movies. She tries to understand her daughter and fix the problem in order to not letting her break inside. But, she sometimes fails to fill the huge generation gap; a gap like an ocean between the life of socially successful mother and her daughter's absurd one. "Khoon Bazi" barely tries to find the roots of the problem though it sometimes gets close to this matter. It just magnifies the problem in order to let it be seen. "Khoon Bazi" even does not have a clear ending. It is not important if Sara gets well or not; addiction remains and might hit a wider range.

I caught this film at the Toronto International Film Festival and was frankly somewhat disappointed. The film is well acted and crafted, but both the story and the cinematography, with its washed out, almost black-and-white, color palette, made me uncomfortable most of the way through the film. The story centers on the relationship between a heroin-addicted daughter and her mother. The part of the daughter is played movingly by director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's real life daughter. The mother character suffers and ultimately facilitates the daughter's addiction, while the daughter endlessly cycles between giving lip service to wanting to clean up, and then getting high "one last time." Good intentions, drugs, and self destruction have been treated more effectively in many other films over the past several decades, for instance Midnight Cowboy. Perhaps because of that, the story here doesn't seem fresh. My hat is off to Rakhshan Bani-Etemad though. It must have taken incredible perseverance to succeed as a woman filmmaker in Iran, and to produce a film dealing with what must be a suppressed subject there. Mainline (several Iranians in the audience insisted that the Persian title is much more effective) is definitely worth seeing if only for an insider's gaze at modern Iran, but expect to be uncomfortable.