Artnewspress :
At moments, the Iranian director’s new movie evokes the rapt domestic suspense of “A Separation” and “The Salesman,” but it’s more diffuse and less potent.
In movies like “A Separation,” “The Past,” and “The Salesman,” the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi has demonstrated a unique ability to take “ordinary” human situations, usually on the domestic front, and play them out in a way that is so minutely authentic yet suspenseful that they give you the sensation that life itself, if observed closely enough, is a kind of thriller. “A Hero,” Farhadi’s latest film (it’s his fourth to premiere at Cannes), very much wants to be a drama of that ilk. Its story of an achingly modest and desperate man who becomes, all too fleetingly, a much discussed figure on television and social media is a story that one could easily imagine being set within the bubbling maelstrom of our own frenetic image culture.
Rahim, the central character, is serving time for an unpaid debt and has been given a two-day leave from prison, during which he launches a plan to salvage his situation. Amir Jadidi, the actor who plays him, is handsome in a placid, at times nearly frozen way. He resembles the young Armand Assante, and when he smiles it’s with a warmth that beckons those around him. Yet there’s a passivity to Rahim that bespeaks his clenched inner fear. As we learn, he’s a man who is quietly drowning.
To start a business, he borrowed money from a loan shark, who was then paid off by Braham (Mohsen Tanabandeh), Rahim’s dyspeptic former brother-in-law, who has now put him in jail. Rahim owes him 150,000 tomans, and not because he’s a deadbeat; his partner ran off with the money. Yet he needs to find a way to squelch the debt, and when Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), who Rahim has been secretly seeing, finds a lost handbag with 17 gold coins in it, that seems to be the way out.
