Mohammad Rasoulof is a dissident Iranian film director who has been sentenced to years in prison and flogging in his own country, where the police are looking for him. In Cannes, he unveils a bold, unnerving picture that does justice to the incredible and scarcely believable drama of his own situation and his nation’s agony.
It is about misogyny and theocracy within Iranian officialdom, trying to intuit and externalise the inner anguish and psychodrama of its dissenting citizens in a country where women can be judicially bullied and beaten for refusing to wear the hijab.
The Sacred Fig Seed starts as a gloomy political domestic drama in the familiar Iranian style and then rises through one dizzying level of crazy traumatised ness after another like some Sergio Leone pueblo shootout.
Iman (Missagh Zareh) is an ambitious lawyer who has just become a state investigator one below full judge on the revolutionary court. He gets a pay rise, better family accommodation, wife (played by actor and anti-hijab protester Soheila Golestani) two student daughters (Setareh Malek and Mahsa Rostami).
But Iman is almost at once disillusioned by this promotion: being expected to rubber-stamp death-penalty judgements without reading any evidence. He is told that he must now be secretive with friends or family who could be threatened or doxed by criminal elements as a means of pressuring him.
Most fatefully of all, he is given a handgun for his family’s protection apparently without any training or advice on how to use it or store it. Naive Iman casually leaves it lying around the house; tucks it into back of trousers like Hollywood gangster. (Are Iranian prosecutors really allowed to be so casual with firearms?)
When Iran explodes with anti-hijab protests, whatever liberal scruples Iman had are squashed. Over dinner, he coldly rebukes his daughters for their rebellious feminist views and accuses them of falling for the propaganda of enemies and foreign elements. “What foreign elements?” demand his daughters Iman sulksily refuses to elaborate. (Here is a flaw in the film, surely: in real life Iman would make some very specific, ugly ,paranoid claims.)
When his wife and daughters help a terrified young female anti-hijab protester who has been shot in the face by police, even this must be concealed from Iman. And then catastrophe strikes Iman’s gun goes missing and with growing resentment and anger he suspects one of the women in his family has taken it and is lying to him. His toxic rage infects the fabric of the film itself.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig starts out in the modern world of Instagram reels and YouTube, composed in that complex oblique style which we have got used to in Iranian cinema from films by Asghar Farhadi: that world of subtle realist implications which has arguably replaced the fashion for poetic sublimeity in Iranian film making. Rasoulof’s mysterious parable Iron Island from 2005 is a good example.
It is possible to watch this movie and initially think (as I must admit I did) that the gun has been stolen by an obvious suspect who is not a member of their family whose reluctance to name the likely perpetrator reflects only their discomfort at having widened the circle of trust beyond the bounds of kinship, in other words, their repression and groupthink.
But no. The answer lies elsewhere and comes out almost incidentally as the plot thickens into something near mind-blowing. We get a car chase, some violence and a final illustration of the rule formulated by Chekhov about what happens with a gun shown in act one. And yes, perhaps The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a film which can only be understood ultimately in those cryptic, poetic and symbolic terms Iranian cinema seemed to have left behind that what Iran has become can be seen from realistic depictions on social media shared via smartphones. It may not be flawless but it is undeniably brave if nothing else then for its timeliness.
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