Mahi va gorbeh

Fish and Cat was recently screened in Iran as part of what is called the "Art and Experience" movement, wherein independent films receive limited screening and all box- office revenue is given to the director and producers in support of such films.

I had personally followed news on Fish and Cat ever since its recognition at the Venice film festival. The movie is advertised as a slasher, and I guess that's what gets audiences all excited about the film in the first place: a number of guys running a restaurant in the north of Iran allegedly serve human meat to their customers (not the most usual theme for an Iranian film) but the movie is far more complex and layered than this simple hook would suggest.

Apart from the seemingly-impossible feat of recording a 2-hour-long movie in one take (I can only imagine how the crew felt after someone made a mistake -- and I assume there must have been at least a few), the cyclical nature of time, the recurrence of events, the eerie voice overs, the sudden shifts in tone and the elements of horror planted here and there made Fish and Cat into a cinematic treat.

Director Shahram Mokri obviously does not expect his audience to make sense of it all. Rather, he wants you to get lost in the borderlands of dream and reality, and he achieves this quite brilliantly. In fact, during the first few loops in time, I found myself trying to figure out what had just happened and at which point in the overall storyline the iterations were taking place; but after the loops occurred increasingly more often half-way through the film, I simply gave up and just waited to see where the film would take me next.

The movie can be viewed as a series of short films wrung together through the story of the restaurant and its ominous cooks, and in spite of the dissimilar themes (coincidence, loss, love, etc.), the overall product is a surprisingly coherent narrative and a successful feature-length film.

A truly exceptional and extraordinary film that was both compelling and technically brilliant. Much like Alexander Sokurov's 2002 film Russian Ark, this film is shot in one single, continuous take that lasts, in this case, over two hours in length. That's enough to make it a technical marvel, but better is that Shahram Mokri manages to make a tantalising tale in the process.

The film starts by relating the urban legend of restaurants in the north of Iran which were shut down due to serving human flesh. Then the single shot begins and we follow two men from a suitably ominous restaurant attempting to coax some lost travellers to dine there. It's a fairly obvious beginning, and the insidious tension is high from the start.

However from there, the tale (and the shot) meanders much more than we might expect. We branch off to follow different characters for a while, then we catch up with old ones. Then, we start to see scenes which are oddly familiar—we end up in cycles, in loops of time that all seem to flow so naturally from one to the other. And there's always that underlying sinister element— we know something bad is going to happen from that first moment of the film, but we don't quite know when.

This is all the hook it needed for me to keep me captivated through this tale. And I was captivated throughout—this was riveting stuff, even as we watch the most mundane conversations between two characters, and then repeat them again from a slightly different angle some time later.

In the discussion after the showing of the film, the director stated fairly unequivocally that he wasn't influenced by any Iranian directors in particular, but as far as I'm concerned there are huge similarities to two of Jafar Panahi's films—the meandering storytelling of Dayereh, which also follows a sequence of different characters, and Closed Curtain (an excellent film I saw at the festival in 2013), which has that same sense of understated mystery and foreboding.

This really was an excellent film—it was ground-breaking and avant-garde in all the best ways possible, and used its uniqueness as a brilliant hook to enhance its appeal.

Just to balance all the other over-enthusiastic reviews:

It is indeed a very well made feature, with some very clever cinematographic ideas, however it gives a two hours of very mundane viewing experience, of a couple of guys walking around the forest, having a very non-interesting conversations or sometimes telling fantastic stories, without their merit, deeper meaning or literary qualities being apparent to me. It was interesting to see Iran's modern middle-class youth, which rarely is a subject of Iranian films. However there was no character development, any kind of psychological or social commentary. One spends most of time trying to piece together the meaning of conversations that are just part of their lives, and to figure out if some point was intended by the director in any given scene, or not?

We were utterly bored, staying in the cinema only to see how the director could solve the end. The end scene is truly beautiful though!

Very beautiful.

The whole movie is a plan . A long sequence without cut but no boring moment . This story inspired by a true story about a restaurant that they cooked with human flesh.

I really liked it.

This is an attempt to create a clumsy copy that the director couldn't made, anything used in this movie such as storyline, scripts, directing, filming, and other stuff are very clumsy, primitive and used in the wrong place and without a purpose, so if you want to waste your more than a 2 hours of your time I highly recommend you to watch it.