Un instant d'innocence

There is absolutely nothing bad I can say about this film. I was lucky enough to attend a screening of this gem last night at the Alamo Drafthouse. The show was nearly sold out, for good reason.

This film is about a real life experience that Mohsen Makhmalbaf had at the age of seventeen. When he was seventeen, he stabbed a police man while participating in a demonstration. He was imprisoned for five years. Twenty years after this event took place, he has made amends with the policeman he stabbed and is now making a film about this incident.

The film is a work of art. It is beautifully shot, with no over the top camera work and editing. The film is masterfully directed and it is very humanistic. This film will probably prove to be one if the most important films in the history of cinema, especially to Iranian filmmakers. I would recommend this film to any and everybody.

From what I've seen of Iranian Cinema, it seems to be that it is simultaneously simple and extremely complex. Simple in the way they capture real life moments, or simply cinematography-wise. Things look exactly how they would look in real life, the directors struggle is not to give reality another layer but to show it exactly like it is. Complex because it operates on so many levels. In "A Moment of Innocence", we talk about the meta-comment on cinema and its attempt to recreate reality, how we perceive our memories and how we would prefer real life to be like. The two main characters and their "young" counterparts are very elaborate, we get to know how their beliefs differ, how closely they resemble each other and what their goals become once they start to understand the way others think.

Beautiful imagery that transports us to the streets of Iran and its snowy roads, fantastic music and a brilliant ending that leaves us glued to the screen.

Though Mohsen Makhmalbaf eventually established a reputation as one of Iran's foremost filmmakers from the late 1980s, his early life was tumultuous: when he was 17, he stabbed a police officer at a protest against the Shah's regime and spent the next four years in prison, only being released after the Shah's overthrow. His 1996 film NUN VA GULDOON ("Bread and Flowerpot", released in the English-speaking world as "A Moment of Innocence") looks back at this episode from his youth, attempting to jointly evoke both the red-hot passion against political injustice of a young man and his older, wiser understanding that such clumsy violence was hardly a productive way to solve the world's problems.

The result is intricately constructed as a film-within-a-film. As it opens, we see the now 40-year-old policeman (Mirhadi Tayebi) visiting Tehran to ask Makhmalbaf for a part in one of his films to make up for the stabbing two decades before. Makhmalbaf, playing himself, decides to make a film loosely based on the stabbing. He chooses a young man (Ali Bakhsi) to play his younger self, and he then asks the policeman to choose an actor as the young version of himself. The policeman, who has a thuggish look and is bitter about never being offered parts in films besides villain ones, chooses a handsome guy to represent himself, but he is then overruled by the filmmaker who chooses a much more boyish-looking and vulnerable young man (Ammar Tafti), emphasizing just how young both Makhmalbaf and the policemen were at the time. This layer of NUN VA GULDOON broadly pokes fun at what Makhmalbaf's life had become after his rise to fame in Iran, having to endlessly deal with ordinary people who fancied themselves actors and were desperate to appear on screen. Much of this part of the film was shot concurrently with his effort SALAAM CINEMA, which is entirely about the film casting process.

Makhmalbaf and the policemen begin coaching the actors playing their younger selves and we see those young people beginning to act their roles, as well as a young lady (Maryam Mohamadamini) playing a girl that the policeman was in love with at the time. In a magical realist fashion, the layers of the film shift in the middle of scenes: one moment we are watching actors play roles, the next moment it is as if the viewer is really seeing what happened in the mid-1970s. It is this magical intertwining of past and present that made NUN VA GULDOON such a powerful experience for me. The ending, which has been fairly praised as "the greatest freeze-frame since Truffaut's LES 400 COUPS", is just as much a work of art in itself as any still from a Tarkovsky film.

Except for Makhmalbaf himself and Moharram Zaynalzadeh in a supporting role as his cameraman, none of the people in the film were trained actors. With Mirhadi Tayebi as the policeman, this is a weak part of the film: he delivers his lines in a stilted way and it is hard to suspend disbelief. With the others, however, Makhmalbaf made a smart choice, as Ammar Tafti and Ali Bakhsi are convincing in their roles, but there is still a youthful awkwardness and authenticity about them that would might have been lost if they were professionals. Most dazzling of all, however, is Maryam Mohamadamini as the love interest. She's a magnetic screen presence, and as the film leads to its incredible ending, she deftly conveys so much of the suspense and drama through gestures alone. It's a huge loss to cinema that she apparently never acted again.

In spite of the film's limitations in terms of some of the acting and the limited resources Makhmalbaf had to work with when making the film, I found NUN VA GULDOON a moving film and that last freeze-frame literally breathtaking. I'd recommend this to any lover of cinema.

Despite its technical flaws here and there, due to the (in)capabilities under which Iran filmmakers have to work -as I'm told-, it would not be an exaggeration to name this film one of the best of all times.

While reflecting or hinting at several 'layers' of personal and social conflicts and dilemmas roaming the daily lives of the youth and eld, native and universal, of the present and the past as well with a striking and effective language; at the same time it makes the viewer laugh one's guts out with the natural and fluent comedy. I daresay Chaplin style.

(Spoiler ahead) Aside from the magnificent bread and flower moment at the end, one of the best scenes is when the girl rushes into a watch repairer's shop filled up with hundreds of watches and clocks, asks the time and is answered "I don't know, these are all broken, we repair them here!" (Paraphrased.)

Don't miss it.

Makhmalbaf has arguably created one of the MOST interesting films I have seen in my entire life.

Casting young men unexperienced in acting to portray himself and the policemen he stabbed when he was 17, the director separates himself and his young self from the policemen and his; they separately train the actors portraying themselves 20 years earlier during an anti-Shah demonstration.

Culminating in the showdown between the young actors, the truths behind the situation unbeknownst to both director and policemen become evident. An extremely powerful film, and I advise you to stop at nothing to view it.