Yes, we're going to see Rosewater, as many of
you have requested. Surprisingly, it disappeared from our usual cinemas,
so we'll be seeing it at TIFF Bell Lightbox, at 350 King St. W., on
Tues., Dec. 9, for the 1:30 screening - meeting near the box office
about 20 minutes earlier.
Tickets are $10 for seniors,
which is a bit more than we usually pay, but the comfort and ambience at
the Lightbox are sumptuous.Rosewater Synopsis:
Rosewater follows the Tehran-born Bahari, a
42-year-old broadcast journalist with Canadian citizenship living in London. In June 2009,
Bahari returned to Iran
to interview Mir-Hossein Moussavi, who was the prime challenger to
controversial incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Moussavi's supporters
rose up to protest Ahmadinejad's victory declaration hours before the polls
closed on election day, Bahari endured great personal risk by submitting camera
footage of the unfolding street riots to the BBC. Bahari was soon arrested by
Revolutionary Guard police, led by a man whose personal scent prompted the
journalist to name him "Rosewater," who proceeded to torture and
interrogate Bahari over the next 118 days.
Review:
David Denby, The New Yorker, Nov. 24, 2014
Early in
“Rosewater,” Jon Stewart’s first film as a feature director, an Iranian-born
journalist, Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal), has a brief meeting in a Tehran
café with a comedian (Jason Jones, from “The Daily Show”), who “interviews” him
for an American TV program. It is 2009, at the time of the Presidential race
between the ultra-conservative incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the liberal
reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The comedian, grinning, pretends to be a spy and
asks Bahari why Iran is such
a terrifying place; Bahari, who is based in London and is a contributor to the BBC and Newsweek,
laughs and doesn’t answer.
The Iranian secret
police, however, operate with an undernourished capacity for comedy; they see
the interview and put Bahari in prison, where he remains for a hundred and
eighteen days, largely isolated except for excruciating sessions with a
“specialist.” In the movie, no mention is made of “The Daily Show,” but the
episode is a reference to a mock conversation between Jones and the real Bahari
that was broadcast on the program in 2009.
Jon Stewart has said
that he feels partly responsible for Bahari’s troubles, and that the movie is
an attempt at “atonement.” It also comes across as a satirist’s impassioned bid
to promote global sanity. In “Rosewater,” Stewart suggests that a government
that will not tolerate humor is capable of the worst tyrannies.
In the film’s early
scenes, as the election nears, Bahari, warily hoisting a digital movie camera,
hangs out with some genial students who support Mousavi. You can sense that
Stewart is trying to find his way: as Bahari gets caught up in protests and
police reprisals, Stewart, working with a small crew (the film was shot in Amman), produces scrappy sequences
with loosely fitted-together shots and dialogue that’s a little clunky and
overexplicit, even didactic. This part of the film lacks ease and mystery—what
might be called authority. Stewart chose the great Iranian actress Shohreh
Aghdashloo to play Bahari’s mother, but, with her tragic face and her
magnificent contralto voice, she plays a tiny role as if she were in an
amphitheatre.
Once Bahari is in
prison, however, “Rosewater” comes to creative life. Some of the cells, painted
gray and white, are oddly shaped; one appears to be an irregular triangle.
Bahari seems caught in a contemporary art installation. The hard-focus clarity
of the images (Bobby Bukowski did the cinematography) leads to an intimacy with
anguish that passes into expressionism. As Bahari sits in a chair, wearing a
black blindfold, his interrogator (Kim Bodnia), whom he calls Rosewater (the
man is heavily scented), lingers over his neck as if he’s about to kiss it—or
bite it.
Stewart shot the two
actors in a tight frame, Bodnia smiling and pleased with his ongoing project
and García Bernal sweating and trembling. The peculiar communion of torturer
and victim has never been dramatized with such creepy immediacy. The two are
matched opposites: Bahari is a modest, good-humored guy who hopes that a little
common sense will restore reality to the situation; Rosewater is a thug who
longs to be sophisticated (klass bala, in Farsi). He wants to become an
interrogator who’s subtle in his manipulations, one who resorts to violence
only occasionally. But his suavity collapses, and he beats Bahari; García
Bernal is so delicate that the scene is more painful to watch than such scenes
usually are.
Rosewater is also
fascinated by what he imagines to be Bahari’s wild sexual adventures as a spy.
“You know what happens in New Jersey,”
Bahari says, leading him on. “Yes, of course, everyone knows what happens in New Jersey,” Rosewater responds, excited by the sexual
possibilities of Fort Lee. In these moments,
Stewart transcends skit satire and pushes to the borders of the comic sinister,
where Kafka and Nabokov live.
Confession and
penance are central to totalitarian regimes: the dissenter must admit to crimes
that he didn’t commit or rectify any discordant remarks he has made so that
they’re in line with the “truth”—in this case, the unitary discourse offered by
holy texts and propounded by the Supreme Leader.
By definition, irony
is impossible; speech can have only one state-defined meaning. A man who talks
to someone who is speaking the language of a “spy” must be a spy himself. Why
else would he be speaking that way? In all, theocrats make bad comics and a
lousy audience for comedy. Bahari tells Rosewater that Newsweek is so
far behind the times that he’s not worth torturing. The tormentor doesn’t get
that one, either.
Restaurant:
Montecito, 299 Adelaide St. W.
We'll definitely need a
reservation, so please NOTIFY TERRY NO LATER THAN MONDAY, DEC. 8 if you're going to Montecito.
