Fish & Cat

Strongly recommended. If you are looking for a meaningful full movie full of symbols, this is the one.

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.

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.

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!

Upon learning the story behind this particular movie, I was filled with excitement and anticipation. Unfortunately, my eagerness was short-lived after watching the movie. The storyline was completely irrelevant, with the text being random and unrelated. The plot of the movie had no clear direction and felt disjointed, with the different parts of the movie lacking any coherence. The performances by the actors felt artificial, with little to no emotion or connection between them. Overall, the movie was a huge letdown, and I highly advise against watching it if you are looking for a good storyline and well-executed performances.