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Khatbi struggles with guilt while trying to cope with the new Tehran. |
Reza Khatibi, France/Iran, 2002, 100 min.
It is one of those contiguous moments of life imitating art and art imitating life, played out on the silver screen. For Iranian director Reza Khatibi, it is a story based on reality; a sort of seven-day personal diary that fictionalizes his own return to Tehran after 14 years of self-imposed exile in France in order to avoid the Iran-Iraq war. But even then, it is more.
Seven Days in Tehran, which debuted at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York in June, depicts Khatibi’s own search for redemption for leaving his country, which results in his desperate need to create a film to change the West’s view of Iran and Islam. But more cleverly it is a mirror of itself, a drama disguised as a documentary about the making of a documentary. With Islamic traditions and customs as the backdrop, this film offers a unencumbered look at how Iranian Muslims lead their daily lives, for better or for worse, and how their choices are perceived by a Western audience.
The film follows a French TV crew, with Khatibi playing himself, which comes to Iran after the re-election of President Mohammad Khatami to film the country’s tenuous rise towards democracy. Khatibi wants to control the filming, but his French producer, Franck, feels they must shoot every nuance of Iranian life in the post-Islamic revolutionary period, be it positive or not.
But as each member of the crew immerses themselves in Iranian culture in engaging subplots, they come to understand the enormous pressure Khatibi feels to show only the good of Iran and Islam – only to find life’s messiness and ambiguities perpetuating itself at every turn of the camera. The film smoothly switches between shots of the “documentary” with scenes of the crew (many who keep their first names) making the documentary.
In the film, Khatibi constantly butts heads with Franck. Khatibi wants to censor certain scenes, which makes no sense to Franck. But the whole argument cleverly becomes a mouthpiece for Iran’s own censorship problems. “I knew there were some things I could not say,” Khatibi told the New York Times. “So one way of saying them was for me, as Reza the documentary director, to tell the television reporter not to discuss the status of women or religion or politics or press freedom on camera.”
“We also show a traditional dinner at Reza's mother's house at the same time as Reza is forbidding the cameraman from recording it. So by appearing to censor myself, I wanted to show the degree of censorship,” Khatibi added.
In fact the film is banned in Iran for reasons unknown to its French producer, Jean-Marie Boulet.
“It’s not easy for us to understand why this film was censored,” Boulet said following the screening of the film. “We tried our best to follow the customs of Iran.”
The film is slow to start, with too much time spent setting up each character. But once days four and five roll around, the story picks up with emotional dialogue and apt pregnant pauses that allow for each individual sensation to set in. It’s painful to witness Khatibi and Franck’s misunderstandings, which come to a head in a powerful scene where Franck spontaneously snatches an Iranian woman’s purse and takes off as a sort of rebellion against Khatabi’s command not to film another thief in action.
The next day, Franck comes to Khatibi’s house and explains what he did. “I know [the West] has a bad vision of the Muslim world. … But your traditions are your strengths,” he quietly says, advising Khatibi to film all Iran as to offer without censoring anything.
One of the film’s most wrenching subplots concerns Franck’s search for his best friend, Esfandiar, who returned to Iran after they completed their studies in Paris. Esfandiar is beautifully played Esfandiar Esfandi, an Iranian friend of Khatibi’s who co-wrote the screenplay. In the film Esfandiar, a professor in Tehran, admits to Franck that he has cancer. With the crew, Esfandiar is a gracious host, but with Franck, he wears his emotions on his sleeve in a searing performance that makes use of every uncomfortable pause.
Esfandiar is a powerful representation of those who stayed in Tehran during its tumultuous years of war. He reads the Qu’ran and calls himself a believer but is besieged by doubts. His struggles are from within while Khatibi’s are from the outside. “We want to show the professor whose job it is to speak, yet he dare not speak his mind,” Khatibi said. “When he falls ill with cancer, we want to show there is an illness among Iranian intellectuals who do not speak.”
Though the movie is quite mild, some scenes that hint at mild flirtations may slightly offend a Muslim viewer. But more importantly Seven Days in Tehran is a clever study of a country on the cusp of religion and politics. It is a complex turn of events framed in the context of seven days that force Khatibi, Franck and the rest of the crew to find a mutual understanding for the customs of Iran and Islam. |
