Beg to Differ

Here are a couple of films I caught up with recently. I liked them well enough, but others seem more impressed. 

A Hero (Asghar Farhadi, 2021)

Farhadi was probably acutely aware that his second international effort, Everybody Knows, was widely considered his worst film to date. His best films -- Fireworks Wednesday, A Separation, and The Past -- exhibit a dramatic sensibility that could be reasonably compared with Chekhov or Ibsen. Many films from Iran, even some of the best ones, don't navigate these waters nearly as well, emphasizing either tyranny or urban-liberal voluntarism, two approaches that can be more satisfactory for Western biases. By contrast, Farhadi  at his best is capable of balancing the tension between strong individuals and the pull of social and economic circumstance, resulting in films that, in their own humanist way, reflect Marx's dictum: people make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing. 

There's certainly quite a bit to admire about A Hero, not only in terms of its aims but its overall construction. Rahim (Amir Jadidi), imprisoned due to a debt owed to ex-brother-in-law Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), is a compelling figure precisely because of his barely suppressed rage at those who oppress and demean him, while knowing that deference and humility are the tools with which he might be able to make himself free. But A Hero relies far too much on stock villains (Bahram, the prison officials, the angry inmate, the HR bureaucrat) who exist in the film simply to antagonize Rahim. It is easy to see how everyone is acting in their own best interests, but only Rahim and his bride-to-be Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoost) evince moral conflict. 

This is troubling because A Hero attempts to level a critique against social media and public relations, and for that critique to land, he really needed to populate his film with functionaries more like those we'd find in a Frederick Wiseman film: ones constrained by their situations, conditioned to make choices that are expedient rather than right or wrong. Instead, Farhadi makes Rahim a victim, knocked around by a culture consumed with superficial, fluctuating notions of honor and decorum. The Internet-addled world Farhadi constructs, where people are won over by the most recent message to pass in front of their eyes, is as broad as the one Dumont created in France, but A Hero signals that we should accept it as a work of critical realism. Really, A Hero offers us "Milkshake Duck: the Movie," which could have been a searing indictment if only Farhadi had embraced the artifice at the film's heart.

El Planeta (Amalia Ulman, 2021)

We are often forgiving of flaws in a debut film, even perhaps thinking that a director's reach exceeding her grasp is a positive sign of ambition. I don't really disagree with this, and I ultimately found more to admire in El Planeta than to dislike. Still, this is a strange, unnerving film precisely because it goes so far out of its way to assert its "minor" character, when Ulman's larger aims are fairly plain to see. 

As I watched El Planeta, I was frequently reminded to two filmmakers whose limited means and downcast tone are a bit of a Trojan horse, concealing more universal aspirations. Ulman's use of boxy framing and urban-hipster atmosphere recalls Hal Hartley; her performance as a quirky young woman trying to navigate a thwarted existence with wry humor suggests Miranda July. As it happens, Ulman thanks both directors in the credits, so there's every reason to think that the influences of these two auteurs of false modesty are intentionally displayed. 

The problem is, Ulman cannot conceal her real motivations. It seems as if we are supposed to consider Leo (Ulman) and and her mother (Ale Ulman) as a pair of tragically deluded bourgeois on the road to ruin, a sort of Grey Gardens of coastal Spain. So early in the film, when we see Leo meet a (Nacho Vigalondo) in a café to discuss a sex work / kept woman arrangement, the fact that El Planeta plays this desperation for laughs implies a clever overall strategy, that perhaps the tone of the film means to mimic the characters' inability to see economic disaster even as it's barreling towards them. The constant shots of Gijón streets with boarded-up shops and restaurants, which Leo and her mom seldom seem to notice, underlines this reading, making the pair a kind of metonym for the Spanish upper class oblivious to the destruction wrought by EU austerity.

But as El Planeta continues, Ulman chooses to make this relationship explicit, in particular when the mother remarks to Leo that she sees going to prison as a viable survival tactic, or the extended phone call where she describes the horror of a homeless shelter. In these moments, both characters and film evince a bizarre awareness of their situation, without gaining any motivation to fix it. I suppose this could be Ulman's point, that the eroding middle class is so wedded to the class structure that they will simply go down with the ship. But what is far more interesting to me (and what Ulman ultimately ignores) is the way that unexpected turns of fortune (the father dying, Leo having to leave her work in London to return to a moribund Gijón) can produce circumstances that destroy people's lives without their ever even knowing it. I guess what I'm saying is, El Planeta is a dramedy about class consciousness or the lack thereof, and the film seems to lack that consciousness about itself.