**** (out of five) The White Meadows. Written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof.
When it is a struggle to find American movies that qualify as merely “serious”, it can be a shock even for a critic to be confronted suddenly with truly profound work. Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadows is just this kind of revelation: a visionary, hypnotic film that is not only beautiful, but has—like many sublime things—exacted a very real price from its maker.
The story is pure myth: a lone man named Rahmat travels in his rowboat around the islands of a brackish, landlocked sea. His profession is even more unusual than his home: touring the islands there, Rahmat collects the tears of the inhabitants, keeping them all in a flask for some unclear purpose. And there are tears aplenty in the place, which is being slowly strangled by salt. With increasing desperation, the people try anything to bring rain: some whisper their laments into glass jars and throw them away; others set their daughters adrift as sacrifices to a sea that has turned poisonous to them. And virtually all give their tears to Rahmat.
What he ultimately does with their precious bodily fluids is both surprising and inevitable and won’t be revealed here. Suffice it to say that Rasoulof presents imagery along the way that is uncannily lovely. Shooting almost entirely on or from the water, he locates Meadows in a luminous no-place that is simultaneously heaven and hell. In a painterly manner, he applies color to this landscape with precision, showing a restraint that makes Antonioni’s imagery look almost haphazard by comparison. To this spare, poetic loveliness, I can compare nothing to this except for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s legendary Woman in the Dunes (1964).
At his very best, Tarsem Singh occasionally approached this quality in The Fall, a spectacle shot for millions with the best available technology on multiple continents. But The White Meadows has a rigorous, almost ethnographic authenticity that Singh’s contrived fable simply can’t manufacture. Part of this stems simply from the fact that Rasoulof, like many contemporary Iranian filmmakers, believes his audience can sit still through his film’s more glacial moments, allowing its spell to—as it were—permeate the moment. At a time when instant gratification is not just routine but demanded, the notion that real poetry can’t be rushed almost qualifies as subversive.
Alas, some see more obvious subversion in Rasoulof’s work. In December, 2010, Rasoulof was sentenced to six years in prison in an Iranian court for “assembly, collusion, and propagandizing against the regime.” His sentence (which is currently on appeal) has since become an international cause célèbre, with such notables as Steven Spielberg, Abbas Kiarostami, and Martin Scorsese speaking out against the regime’s heavy hand.
Rasoulof, for his part, appears to have known exactly how this fable might be read: in one Kafkaesque episode in the film, Rahmat encounters a painter who is punished by his fellow villagers for painting the sea red instead of blue. To “correct” him, they force him to gaze into the sun, then try pouring monkey urine in his eyes. Despite these remedies, the painter insists that the sea is “many colors”. Last we see him, he’s on a prison island, forced to clamber up and down the salty ramparts by a miserable jailor who has himself contributed heavily to Rahmat’s store of tears.
This is perhaps the most subversive theme raised by Meadows, and resoundingly confirmed by the ongoing events of the “Arab Spring”: in some kinds of tyranny, everyone, even the oppressors, can feel trapped. The mullahs and Revolutionary Guards might have given Rasoulof credit instead of jail time for suggesting they also have tears to shed. But that would require imagination—a quality perhaps more precious than tears in the halls of power.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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