The last film of Asghar Farhadi, the hero, will be screened in the coming days at the Cannes Film Festival. An elephant that many Iranian and non-Iranian critics and spectators are waiting for.
Asghar Farhadi’s latest film “Hero” is about to be screened at the 74th Cannes Film Festival.This film is considered as the closing film of the festival, which adds to its importance.In addition, many prestigious cinematic media in the world have made “Hero” one of the most important films in this period of the festival.
Asghar Farhadi is the most important known filmmaker among his contemporaries, namely the generation of filmmakers after the revolution.A filmmaker whose work can now be said to be not limited to his homeland and has a global scale.One can even be a little bold and after Abbas Kiarostami, he is considered the most international Iranian filmmaker known for his films.
Because there are filmmakers like Bahman Ghobadi or Jafar Panahi whose names are heard in each of the important first-rate film festivals, but this comes more from the domestic politicized atmosphere and the policy-making of festivals and political actions of each of these directors than about their films and the quality of their films. is.
About filmmakers like Panahi and Ghobadi, these are the ones who are well-known, and some of their ordinary and not-so-good films (for example, “Tehran Taxi”) have been seen and received awards for their names being associated with politics.But Farhadi’s case is different, viewers and critics of world cinema know him by his films and consider his name synonymous with “separation” or “seller” and not this or that political act.Because Farhadi himself is one of those conservative filmmakers whose political positions should be sought in his films and not in his interviews with domestic and foreign media.
Whether we like Farhadi’s style of filmmaking or not, whether we consider it conservative and harmless, whether it is protesting and highly critical, we cannot deny the attention and all the special and unique characteristics of this talented director.Farhadi has now reached his specific language and style after making more than 9 films.A style with fixed and repetitive technical and thematic elements that find their place in every film and story.
Influenced by the realism of European films, the style is both the hyper-reality of modern art and the storytelling of new novels and postmodern literature.In addition to all this, although the dramatic structure of Farhadi’s films is not classic and in the style of Maloof Hollywood, it has nevertheless borrowed the drama and the kind of suspense from American cinema.
Under the pretext of unveiling Farhadi’s latest film, which was made in Iran, unlike “The Past” and “Everyone Knows”, we have taken a look at the most important repetitive features in Asghar Farhadi’s films.
This is the most important feature of Farhadi cinema that has come from the literature and literary school of the new novel.Although many Iranian and foreign directors have used open endings before Farhadi, his roots go back to literature.The open ending is very pervasive in modern films and even further in postmodern works, and it can even be said that most of the films that have a modern approach lead to an “open ending”.The open ending was one of the first features that separated modern films from classics.
It should be noted that the modern ending in the films of each director can not be considered a unique feature or feature.But in the case of Asghar Farhadi, it can be said that this happens and the endings of the game, each of which are independent, but have a common context.
The open endings in Farhadi’s films leave the traces of each film in the mind of the viewer for several days and even more, and keep his mind very busy.”Is Eli finally alive or dead?” “Was Ellie in her morgue?” “Did Nader and Simin separate?” “Does a ghost tell the good news that she was right about her husband’s betrayal of her hairdressing neighbor?” “Does the old man die on the stairs so that Emad will be in conflict with himself and his sense of torment forever?” “Is he the cause of the old man’s death at all?” These are all questions that have occupied the minds of every viewer and critic for a long time after watching Farhadi’s films.
Farhadi designs such questionable endings not only in order not to end his drama, but also to keep the viewer’s mind in the film and force him to think about the fate of each film.
One of the prominent visual features in Farhadi’s works, which has found its way directly into his worldview and works from European films and Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.The hand-held camera in Farhadi’s works emphasizes both the mere realism of the films and therefore becomes an important part of the aesthetics of Farhadi’s works, and at the same time represents the inner tensions of the characters and the anxiety of the drama itself.
In the film “About Eli”, Farhadi’s intense collaboration with Hossein Jafirian as the director of photography results in one of the most interesting examples of cameras on the hands of Iranian cinema.This is while the handheld camera has been used so much and unnecessarily in Iranian films, especially social films of the last two decades, that it has completely lost its subjectivity and creative aspect.
However, Farhadi, along with Mahdavian, is one of the few filmmakers who knows exactly why they use a hand-held camera, and the resulting images have dramatic logic and reason, both thematically and visually, and are perfectly valid.
This is the most well-known feature of Farhadi’s films in the eyes of the general public, and it happens to be the main reason for the interest of Western communities and foreign critics in Farhadi’s films.
Farhadi plays with a false theme in each of his films in an interesting way.This lie is sometimes a fundamental dramatic knot established by one of the characters, and of course it manifests itself in another way: sometimes the filmmaker himself secretly traps his viewer in a small and seemingly insignificant but fateful lie.
For example, in “About Ellie”, at one point, the filmmaker hides the fact that Ellie is engaged from the viewer and some of the characters.(This is while Sepideh knows this truth.) And in the final stage, Farhadi brutally forces his hero Sepideh to lie for the common good in order to sacrifice the lost Eli to his living friends, who may, if the truth be told, Get in trouble.
In “Rare Separation from Simin”, this time the complementary characters and the filmmaker collaborate.In fact, the filmmaker lies to the viewer with his secrecy and failure to show the sequence of the accident, while the character ultimately can not bear the torment of his secret conscience, and at the very moment when the ransom money can change his life, he even agrees to tell the truth. Everything is ruined. In “Separation,” it is the filmmaker himself who lies.
The most complex thematic aspect of all of Farhadi’s films is the right to “judge” the viewers, but throughout the film he tries to drag him down.A feature that is closely related to Farhadi’s favorite theme, which is lying.
The spectator’s judgment has a special place in all of Farhadi’s films and is the connecting point of the various dramatic dimensions of the films.What about his first films “Dancing in the Dust” and “Beautiful City”, which are slightly different in content from his later films and deal with the weak and the lower class (in Farhadi’s later films he focuses on the middle class and the middle culture of the middle class). In his most important films, it is the viewer’s mental engagement with the category of judging that seems important.
It is as if the filmmaker wants to put every spectator in front of him.Throughout the film, he puzzles the viewer with dramatic reasons and motives to safely judge himself and take the side of one of the film’s characters, but suddenly, in a dramatic moment, he disrupts everything and the viewer’s mindset about the whole story. It changes.This is the smartest feature of Asghar Farhadi’s filmmaking style.
This is the least seen feature of this list.The German that is rarely talked about, but not only in a corner of each of the male characters that Farhadi has created so far, that this traditional side of the male character, has always had dramatic effects and the narrative process of the film and the goal point of each work towards And they have taken the side that is the result of the traditional masculine look.
This traditional masculine view is not only recognizable in the male characters (who, sometimes like Emad “The Salesman” is the protagonist of the film, sometimes as a complementary role in the argument of “separation”), but also in Farhadi’s films.
Farhadi’s films not only have a strong social aspect, after all, he is one of the first founders of the Iranian cinema day in dealing with dark social themes, and the filmmaker’s approach to his stories is also from a sociological point of view.Farhadi has always seen that masculine and traditional view of society as dominant, this masculine view of the inner society dominates his films, and in paying attention to male characters, he also portrays its activist aspect.
Hojjat is perhaps the most traditional man in Farhadi’s films, complementing “Separation”, but the most evolved example of such a character is Emad in “The Salesman”.A character with a complex mechanism in which the monster inside it is routed moment by moment.A young, seemingly intellectual man who is a theater actor (a testament to his intellectualism) but when he gets involved in the case of his wife being abused, he becomes a modern emperor who has nothing to retaliate against.
We have to wait for the more public release of “Hero” تا to see what story Farhadi has used this time and which of these elements have been highlighted or faded in his new film, which includes his current look and worldview.
Source : salamcinama.ir