Contos Iranianos

Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's TALES is a film which oozes anguish from every frame. It's telling us that the society she is showing is in miserable disarray. There is a sanctions hit the already distressed message in there too. This gets automatic enthusiasm from some activist commentators and automatic dismissal from the entertainment lot, in the unlikely event that they stray into a showing.

The production was shot piecemeal, getting censor clearance for shorts being easier than for features. There isn't even the linking devices of U.S. films like TALES OF MANHATTAN or THE GUN. The characters from one episode walk out of the frame to leave those of the next. We do get a documentary film maker appearing from time to time - one sustained take represents his coverage of a van full of dispossessed factory workers.

Not all the stories convince or involve but the final dialogue between the dried-out junkie social worker and her ex student-demonstrator taxi driver is a grabber.

This and the film's addition to those other movie accounts of present day Iranian life make it worth attention.

Moaadi, the star of A SEPARATION appears and the meager production values represented by the usual washed out colour are more than adequate for the task.

Added one points because of the last tale and good ending.

As the title suggests, Tales consists of multiple segments, each telling a story of the life of characters from Rakhshan Bani-etemad's older movies. Segments are non-related, and characters come from different stories, yet they struggle with everyday problems that might appear slightly different from each other, but most of them have common causes at the very core. It sometimes gets uncomfortable, as it should, telling stories of people's pain dealing with drugs, poverty, confinement, etc., but it tries not to make it too unbearable for the audience. The only fact that the writer could bring a handful of feature-length stories, pursue them as short features, put them side by side and make a movie out of them that is smooth, connected and understandable, even for someone unfamiliar with those stories beforehand, is enough to prove the great talent of Bani-etemad as a writer and as a filmmaker. As its said in the movie, no story's ever left unheard, and Tales is a story that's absolutely worth hearing.

This episodic film shows the seamier side of contemporary, urban Iran (it is surprising that the government censors let it through), including prostitution, drug addiction, drug trafficking, corruption, marital infidelity, etc. The episodes themselves (which are very loosely connected, with a documentary filmmaker having a cameo in most of them) are very uneven, going from the inspired to the amateurish. Apparently, some of the characters in them have appeared in past movies of the director. The best episode has a venal bureaucrat abusing a retired citizen who has arrived to his office asking for his health insurance to cover a recent operation. The episode of the jealous husband arriving to a women's shelter to attack his runaway wife is not very impressive. The one with the illiterate worker flying with rage when a letter arrives (which he cannot read) to his wife from her former husband starts well but ends in a note of sentimentality. And the first and last episodes, both set on a taxi, are pretty dismal, full of never ending, aimless chatting.

This well-directed and well-acted movie, telling different short stories, gives a realistic view of contemporary Tehran and Iran. The director is actually revisiting her old characters in her previous movies to see what has happened for them after these many years. Having known that, even without seeing and remembering all previous characters, the film has its own great new and independent stories. Movement from each tale is smooth although the duration of each part is not timely balanced.

After all, the effort of the director and actors to show true stories of normal life, although it is looking at the dark side, is well worth watching for true cinema lovers who want to see realistic movie.