Pig (Mani Haghighi, 2018)

This film was my first extended exposure to Iranian independent Mani Haghighi. I say "extended," because several years ago I started watching, but did not finish, his debut film Men At Work, about a group of guys on a road trip up in the mountains who encounter a semi-precarious looking rock monolith and become irrationally obsessed with knocking it down. It struck me at the time as a bit too one-note, but looking back, that was clearly the point. It's a film, like Pig, about masculinity gone berserk. (I have not seen Haghighi's last film, A Dragon Arrives!, although I know it has a fairly high reputation.)

Pig is a jet-black comedy about, among other things, beheadings, being blacklisted by the Ayatollah, and the conflicts that can arise in an open marriage. As you've probably guessed, this is a film that doesn't conform to Western audiences' typical idea of what Iranian films do, and in this regard, Haghighi continually refers back to pre-Revolutionary cinema without ever explicitly dipping into the taboo topics or gestures of that period. That's to say, he takes things right to the edge of apparent blasphemy, but stops short, largely by depicting a decadent, intellectual Tehran of artists and filmmakers for whom religion is hardly a concern. 

A censor would look at Pig and think that it shows these people in a suitably bad light, I suppose. The rest of us simply recognize garden-variety narcissism and neurosis. The main character, Hasan (Hasan Majuni) is a director who has been blacklisted, and is reduced to making commercials for bug spray. His last major success, a film called Rendezvous in the Slaughterhouse, has faded into the distance. His entourage, including his star actress / lover Shiva (Leila Hatami), are moving onto other projects with other directors, much to Hasan's chagrin. And, to make matters worse, a serial killer is loose in Tehran, cutting off the heads of prominent filmmakers and carving the word "pig" into their foreheads. 

Hasan is in a state of constant perturbation. Not only can he not work. The killer is coming for all his friends, but not him, which only cements his status as a has-been.  

Haghighi's style is brash and at times kinetic, but always focused on the distinction between the garish world of cinema and the bland, sunlit world outside. I was reminded more than once of two very different directors, Tsai Ming-liang and Nicolas Winding Refn. Tsai can be seen above, in the outfits of the musical bug commercial and other outlandish accoutrements that lend a physicality and theatricality to Pig. The gory parts, along with a preference for deep reds, blues, and greens, speak to an affinity for Winding Refn. Needless to say, neither director is typically a point of contact one expects to find in Iranian cinema. So I will definitely be keeping an eye on Haghighi.