Le cycliste

The wife of Nasim, an Afghan immigrant in Iran, is gravely ill. He needs money to pay for her care, but his day labor digging wells does not pay enough. A friend connects Nasim to a two-bit promoter who sells tickets to watch Nasim ride a bicycle continuously for a week.

What strikes me most about this film is not even the film itself, which has many good qualities. It is the world that is being filmed. With the Middle East constantly in the news, the region is a common focus of American movies. But seeing the people through the eyes of a director who lives there... it is a completely different experience.

One scholar has analyzed the film as an allegory which parallels the exploitation that Afghan refugees suffer from in Iran and from which they are unable to escape. I do not know enough to comment on this, though it is interesting to note that Mohsen Makhmalbaf, although Iranian, does seem to have a preoccupation with the Afghan people.

The Iranian movie Bicycleran was shown in the U.S. with the title The Cyclist (1987). It was written and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. (Makhmalbaf is the director of the highly acclaimed film Kandahar. He is also the director who is impersonated by the protagonist in the Kiarostami movie Close-Up.)

Moharram Zaynalzadeh plays Nasim, an Afghani refugee in Iran. His wife is near death from illness, and Nasim--although he is intelligent and eager to work--cannot afford to pay for her medical care.

In Afghanistan, Nasim was a serious bicyclist who once was able to ride his bike continually for three days. Now, in order to obtain money, he agrees to ride the bike for seven days straight.

There are multiple sub-plots involving gamblers who are pro- or anti-Nasim, but I found that aspect of the movie very confusing. The problem is that the real plot is Nasim's suffering as he continues to cycle around and around the circle. However, you can't have a movie showing nothing but a man riding a bicycle, so director Makhmalbaf had to find something to show us other than that. What he shows us offers a glimpse of society in Iran, and a harsh look at the oppression of the Afghans that have fled there.

I thought the movie would be in black, white, and gray. Absolutely incorrect--the Iranian urban scenes (at least in 1987) were a riot of noise and color. The film is filled with activity, both at the cycling site and the city around the site.

We saw the film on DVD, where it worked very well. Any film will work better in a theater than on a small screen, but The Cyclist didn't suffer much by the transfer to DVD.

As I write this review, The Cyclist has an IMDb rating of 7.4, which is good. I thought it was even better than that, and gave it a 9. However, it's not a movie for everyone. I don't know what audience The Cyclist had in Iran, but in the U.S. this film is definitely for people who like unusual foreign movies with sub-titles. We love unusual foreign movies with sub-titles, so we thought it was great.

Cyclist is a strong movie, and similar to other early works of Makhmalbaf, intertwines several social messages: justice, exploitation of the poor, con men who try to turn every opportunity into gold, and complete disconnection of the rich and the powerful from the world of lower classes. Other reviewers have commented at length about the social justice aspects of this movie. But it seems what most people miss about this movie is that it is, above all, a love story.

Nasim, a former cyclist champion in Afghanistan is now working as a laborer in Iran. His wife is in hospital, and Nasim desperately needs money for her treatment. For that, he agrees to participate in a betting show in which Nasim would have to ride his bicycle for seven days and nights without sleeping.

It is interesting that Nasim as the protagonist, does not have any dialog in the movie. He only speaks with his face, and nothing in the movie is stronger than the pain and love on his face when he is looking at or thinking of his bed-stricken wife. This is the ultimate love story in which the knight goes to absolute extremes to save the woman he loves from death. How many of us can claim to have gone to such lengths for our loved ones?

At the same time, Makhmalbaf also develops a side story of an innocent love starting to take root: the young boy who accompanies Nasim falls in love with the young daughter of a gypsy. Ultimately they are forced to part ways without sharing anything more than an apple, but the strength of those scenes are significant. In this movie Makhmalbaf showed that his true talent was in depiction of love, not social justice announcements.

Nonetheless, given that this was Revolutionary Iran in 80s the social justice aspects of the movie remains strong, and eventually repetitive. In his early movies Makhmalbaf often fell into the habit of repeating his message too many times and too obviously, perhaps to win favors from revolutionary officials. However if we can put aside the social lens and watch the Cyclist as a love story, we may find it a truly emotional and influential movie.

Even though you could narrate it as some strange curiosity like story the film is very strong and realistic drama and you are actually forced to feel all the heavy consequences which Nasim and his son are in the middle of. To rescue his wife´s life Nasim jeopardizes his own. And what other chance has he got? Absolutely alone, penniless fugitive... Makhmalbaf doesn´t make anything easier to his characters, he tells the story with all the roughness, which it really has, but at the same time he catches your heart.

In the aftermath of the Soviet invasion and civil war, hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled across the border with Iran. There they struggled to survive, offering themselves as day labourers at exploitive wages, harassed by officials and just ignored by the bulk of Iranian society. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1987 film BICYCLERAN ("The Cyclist") is an allegory for the Afghan refugee experience,

Nasim (Moharram Zaynalzadeh) must pay the hospital stay of his ailing wife and bring up his son Jomeh (Mohammad Reza Maleki), but even backbreaking labour as a well-digger doesn't pay the bills. When a local business learns that Nasim once rode a bicycle for three nonstop, he offers the desperate man the chance to save his family: ride a bicycle for a week in a makeshift circus ring.

Makhmalbaf communicates Nasim's lack of humanity by giving him very few lines. Most of the film consists of arguments among the gamblers and local politicians who stand to profit or lose from Nasim's act, as in the background he circles around and around and around. This film would already be heartrending if it were a straight-up tale, but Makhmalbaf makes it even more poignant with a light dusting of magic realism.

Though less elegant than some of his later films like NUN VA GULDOON (released internationally as "A Moment of Innocence"), this is a memorable film and it's easy to see how it established Makhmalbaf's reputation internationally. Iranian cinema holds many delights, and this is one of its triumphs.