Review by nunculus

This extraordinarily bizarre film is a triumph of the crushingly

personal. Bahman Farmanara, an Iranian filmmaker thwarted in

his attempts to make movies for twenty-two years, made his

comeback with this autobiographical fragment that literally defies

all genre rules--it falls between every imaginable classification

stool. Its sole resemblance to other, more celebrated films of the

"Iranian New Wave" is in its acute meta-ness.

Farmanara, playing himself in the most pained self-portrait of a

director since Lucio Fulci's CAT IN THE BRAIN, finally gets a

project past the Iranian censors: a documentary for Japanese TV

on Iranian burial rituals. In what at first seems either like a ripoff of

Woody Allen, or a parody of TASTE OF CHERRY, Farmanara uses

this morbid premise as an excuse to rehearse his own death and

burial. What springs from this neurosis is neither funny, exactly,

nor poignant. It dances to the beat of its own drummer, as elusive

and smokelike in tone as a short story by Bruno Schulz or isaac

Babel. One cannot say that Farmanara has shed all the rust of

those twenty-two years; or, frankly, that his phlegmatic

performance--he looks like Harold Bloom feeling the weight of

world literature on his shoulders--works. But as an exemplar of

making movies as the voicing of individual feelings and beliefs,

SMELL OF CAMPHOR goes to the head of the class.