Chris Knipp
11-16-2014, 01:41 AM
Jon Stewart: ROSEWATER (2014)
http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ros.jpg
Kim Bodnia, Gael Garcia Bernal in Rosewater
An evanescent depiction of a very heavy tale
"Rosewater" is what Maziar Bahari (played in this film by Gael García Bernal) called his nameless interrogator, for the stinky cologne he used to cover, with pathetic inadequacy, his perpetual B.O. The Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker was arrested while staying at his mother's house in Teheran in 2009. He had come there for Newsweek to interview reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who seemed to have wide popular support, especially among the youth. Then when massive protests broke out following a suspicious declared "victory" by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bahari had chosen to extend his stay, despite his English wife Paola (Claire Foy) being quite pregnant. Bahari had done some foolish things, notably appearing in a farcical "Daily Show" skit with an American "spy," but he had also been careful, refusing to film young activists' "dish university" and asking them not to reveal their real names (though they did). You might expect him to have been detained for a few days. But he was held in solitary confinement and tortured and interrogated for nearly four months.
"The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart's debut as a movie director depicting this story, freely based on Bahari's memoir Then They Came for Me, is admirable, and, like Stewart himself, very intelligent. He is particularly good at sketching in the details of Bahari's life and the rapid events leading up to his incarceration. This pointless action, which international outrage brought finally to an end, is symbolic of a serious new development: journalists are less and less safe. This is true in the United States, where the Obama administration has been notably uncooperative with newsmen as well as unprecedentedly brutal with whistleblowers. "Rosewater" (Kim Bodnia) calls Bahari a spy-journalist, as if this were a commonplace new category.
All this is very serious stuff and Stewart takes his new role as filmmaker seriously, perhaps too much so, despite injecting moments of humor, some sharply ironic, some witty, some awkward. But Rosewater as a whole feels a little lightweight. Partly this is a failure of technique. The film is too arty and artificial in some of the devices it uses to depict Bahari's ordeal, but not artificial enough to achieve pointed satire. The great classic in this field, with a triumphant sense of the idiocy of modern oppressors, is Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In practical terms, Stewart's conscious choice to downplay the actual physical torture/abuse Bahari underwent in favor of the purely psychological kind has the same lightening effect. Bahari never eats the nasty prison food or goes to the bathroom; his fashionable short beard never grows long.
It's true, having your "Sopranos" DVD set and much else stubbornly categorized as "pornography," and finding your borderline tongue-in-cheek tales of New Jersey as a sink of vice bought hook, line, and sinker, are Bahari's direct experiences of how laughably absurd the practices and thinking of repressive regimes like Iran's so often are. But the awareness that this film is the work of a humorist can never be far out of one's mind as one watches, despite its desire to be serious.
Stewart resorts to a few too many playful devices as part of a prison narrative, showing buildings lighting up to illustrate the young Teheran revolutionaries' media connectivity; staging almost constant fantasy dialogues between Bahari and his sister and deceased father, both activists who served long prison terms. There are a few too many jump cuts, meant to show a distorted sense of time but ending by reducing the viewer's sense of it how long this ordeal was for its victim.
The actors are good, and some of them are Iranian, notably Shohreh Aghdashloo as Bahari's mother and Golshifteh Farahani as his sister Maryam. But García Bernal is, of course, Mexican, and Kim Bodia, who plays his interrogator, is Danish. And 98% of the dialogue, even among the young activists on the streets of Teheran, is in variously accented English. The film was primarily shot in Jordan, in a real prison, and the extras are Arabs, not Iranians. Once again like older American movies about the Middle East this winds up having a kind of Orientalist homogeneity at a time when language has been getting more specific and real even in Hollywood productions.
The always appealing García Bernal plays Maziar Bahari as a naive nice guy, and also a softie, easily frightened, but also capable of breaking into laughter. There is a marvelous sequence when, after Bahari has been allowed to call his wife, he does a solitary dance of joy to a Leonard Cohen song. It's good that this scene is allowed to run a little long. A dance can stop time: think of the magical one in Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers. Here the moment is a welcome break and a reminder (such as we get a lot in Midnight Express) that even in the worst prison ordeals there are sweet moments.
But there is a difference between oppression so Kafkaesque you wish it were unreal, and scenes so absurd and borderline silly you find them hard to believe.
Rosewater, 104 mins., debuted at Telluride, showing also at Toronto and London. Limited US theatrical release 14 November 2014.
Related films: The Green Wave (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3054-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2011&p=26034#post26034) (Ahadi), Waltz with Bashir (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2339-New-York-Film-Festival-2008/page2&s=&postid=20811#post20811) (Folman), Persepolis (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2200-Vincent-Paronnaud-Marjane-Satrapi-Persepolis-(2007)&p=19148#post19148) (Paronnaud, Satrapi).
*US repressiveness is why Laura Poitras, who made Citizenfour, lives in Berlin, and Glenn Greenwald, who reports on global surveillance programs and delivered Edward Snowden's NSA spying revelations, lives in Brazil.
http://www.chrisknipp.com/newpictures/ros.jpg
Kim Bodnia, Gael Garcia Bernal in Rosewater
An evanescent depiction of a very heavy tale
"Rosewater" is what Maziar Bahari (played in this film by Gael García Bernal) called his nameless interrogator, for the stinky cologne he used to cover, with pathetic inadequacy, his perpetual B.O. The Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker was arrested while staying at his mother's house in Teheran in 2009. He had come there for Newsweek to interview reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who seemed to have wide popular support, especially among the youth. Then when massive protests broke out following a suspicious declared "victory" by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bahari had chosen to extend his stay, despite his English wife Paola (Claire Foy) being quite pregnant. Bahari had done some foolish things, notably appearing in a farcical "Daily Show" skit with an American "spy," but he had also been careful, refusing to film young activists' "dish university" and asking them not to reveal their real names (though they did). You might expect him to have been detained for a few days. But he was held in solitary confinement and tortured and interrogated for nearly four months.
"The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart's debut as a movie director depicting this story, freely based on Bahari's memoir Then They Came for Me, is admirable, and, like Stewart himself, very intelligent. He is particularly good at sketching in the details of Bahari's life and the rapid events leading up to his incarceration. This pointless action, which international outrage brought finally to an end, is symbolic of a serious new development: journalists are less and less safe. This is true in the United States, where the Obama administration has been notably uncooperative with newsmen as well as unprecedentedly brutal with whistleblowers. "Rosewater" (Kim Bodnia) calls Bahari a spy-journalist, as if this were a commonplace new category.
All this is very serious stuff and Stewart takes his new role as filmmaker seriously, perhaps too much so, despite injecting moments of humor, some sharply ironic, some witty, some awkward. But Rosewater as a whole feels a little lightweight. Partly this is a failure of technique. The film is too arty and artificial in some of the devices it uses to depict Bahari's ordeal, but not artificial enough to achieve pointed satire. The great classic in this field, with a triumphant sense of the idiocy of modern oppressors, is Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. In practical terms, Stewart's conscious choice to downplay the actual physical torture/abuse Bahari underwent in favor of the purely psychological kind has the same lightening effect. Bahari never eats the nasty prison food or goes to the bathroom; his fashionable short beard never grows long.
It's true, having your "Sopranos" DVD set and much else stubbornly categorized as "pornography," and finding your borderline tongue-in-cheek tales of New Jersey as a sink of vice bought hook, line, and sinker, are Bahari's direct experiences of how laughably absurd the practices and thinking of repressive regimes like Iran's so often are. But the awareness that this film is the work of a humorist can never be far out of one's mind as one watches, despite its desire to be serious.
Stewart resorts to a few too many playful devices as part of a prison narrative, showing buildings lighting up to illustrate the young Teheran revolutionaries' media connectivity; staging almost constant fantasy dialogues between Bahari and his sister and deceased father, both activists who served long prison terms. There are a few too many jump cuts, meant to show a distorted sense of time but ending by reducing the viewer's sense of it how long this ordeal was for its victim.
The actors are good, and some of them are Iranian, notably Shohreh Aghdashloo as Bahari's mother and Golshifteh Farahani as his sister Maryam. But García Bernal is, of course, Mexican, and Kim Bodia, who plays his interrogator, is Danish. And 98% of the dialogue, even among the young activists on the streets of Teheran, is in variously accented English. The film was primarily shot in Jordan, in a real prison, and the extras are Arabs, not Iranians. Once again like older American movies about the Middle East this winds up having a kind of Orientalist homogeneity at a time when language has been getting more specific and real even in Hollywood productions.
The always appealing García Bernal plays Maziar Bahari as a naive nice guy, and also a softie, easily frightened, but also capable of breaking into laughter. There is a marvelous sequence when, after Bahari has been allowed to call his wife, he does a solitary dance of joy to a Leonard Cohen song. It's good that this scene is allowed to run a little long. A dance can stop time: think of the magical one in Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers. Here the moment is a welcome break and a reminder (such as we get a lot in Midnight Express) that even in the worst prison ordeals there are sweet moments.
But there is a difference between oppression so Kafkaesque you wish it were unreal, and scenes so absurd and borderline silly you find them hard to believe.
Rosewater, 104 mins., debuted at Telluride, showing also at Toronto and London. Limited US theatrical release 14 November 2014.
Related films: The Green Wave (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?3054-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2011&p=26034#post26034) (Ahadi), Waltz with Bashir (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2339-New-York-Film-Festival-2008/page2&s=&postid=20811#post20811) (Folman), Persepolis (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2200-Vincent-Paronnaud-Marjane-Satrapi-Persepolis-(2007)&p=19148#post19148) (Paronnaud, Satrapi).
*US repressiveness is why Laura Poitras, who made Citizenfour, lives in Berlin, and Glenn Greenwald, who reports on global surveillance programs and delivered Edward Snowden's NSA spying revelations, lives in Brazil.