A moral drama with Asghar himself

A still from Asghar Farhadi’s film A Hero; (inset) a screengrab from Azadeh Masihzadeh’s All Winners, All Losers

You've gotta be blessed with stud-bull confidence in your script to film the opening five minutes of a movie, with nothing, but the lead character - between long and tracking shots - walking out of prison, to meet his brother-in-law, who's a construction worker fixing the Tomb of Xerxes, in Marvdasht, Iran.

Thus starts Cannes 2022 awardee, Asghar Farhadi's A Hero (playing in Indian theatres, Friday onwards). Better still for its bombastic title, the hero in A Hero, a good-looking gent called Mr Soltani (Amir Jadidi), is an inmate on a two-day parole, having been in prison for three years, over a debt he couldn't repay. That hardly makes him a hero.

What follows, sort of, could. In the sense that he claims to have found a bag full of gold coins. It was worth an amount that could head him closer to the prison's exit gate. Pledging that money, he could technically convince his lender to sign off a "creditor's agreement", pardoning him of the crime. He can return home to his only kid, who stays with his sibling's family.

Only that Mr Soltani chooses to return that bag to a bank, spreading the word on what's ‘lost and found' - asking the rightful owner to get in touch with the safe-keeper.

The proverbial hero's journey here is anything but. The film is a moral drama - so subtle that audiences otherwise hardened by the hanging balance of life and death that conflicts in thrillers tend to deal with, will wonder: what's the big deal here anyway?

Like Italian neo-realism of the 1940s/50s, that's been the hallmark of Iranian New Wave, it deals with human tensions so strongly under the surface, and seemingly trivial on the face of it, that you begin to internalise movies for what it is. Rather than view them off your head. They defy genre.

As with Abbas Kiarostami spinning a quiet suspense, about a man posing as his fellow director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Close Up). Or Majid Majidi drawing tears for a boy, who wants to come third in a school race (Children of Heaven). Or indeed Farhadi's own films. They're the finest from the Iranian stable at the moment.

Firstly, the families feel like ours - Indians are more similar to Persian homes than we realise. There is precious little going on in terms of striking action on screen.

But you can't take your eyes off, because Farhadi knows how to stage drama, with such subtle honesty - taking shots with actors always in motion, and frames within frames - that there is never a wasted moment, when something new isn't getting unravelled still.

As with Farhadi's Oscar winners, A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016), so with A Hero (2022), among multiple characters, you constantly look for who's right, who's not. Nobody's fully at fault, or indisputably a saint.

Yet everybody's doing the right thing, as it were. There is gentleness to this approach, which, if it wasn't for the soft power of Persian cinema, we would've continued to believe in the hardness of Iranian society. That the Western governments would prefer for its propaganda anyway.

Mr Soltani, a hero, with help of a charity organisation, sympathetic authorities in prison (with possible agendas of their own), and a consequent interest shown by mainstream press to his act of unlikely grace and kindness, is on his way out of prison as reward.

Only that nobody is sure, has he been making up stuff all along? No, you can tell, his story is not a lie. But it's not the truth either! What hangs over him is also the spectre of social media, that can both make, and shame, heroes, overnight.

So far, so great. Now let me take you through another ethical conundrum. Just like the fictional Mr Soltani, there is an actual man called Mr Shokri, who's been in jail for three years, over financial payment issues. He got his prison term in Iran waived off - for the hero he became, on national TV, after finding a bag of gold, advertising for its rightful owner, having passed on the bounty to a bank!

Like Mr Soltani, Mr Shokri excelled at paint-work on prison walls, and has a child living with his sibling. Also, one isn't certain who actually received that bag of gold, if there was one at all.

Filmmaker Azadeh Masihzadeh made a documentary All Winners, All Losers (available on YouTube) on Mr Shokri, accusing Farhadi of plagiarism thereafter. This is no coincidence. Masihzadeh was Farhadi's film student.

He charged her with criminal defamation that could result in prison term, plus public lashing. The Iranian court threw out the case. It will decide on the plagiarism charge against Farhadi instead. Which if proven true means, at the bare minimum, Farhadi is a debtor to Masihzadeh - he owes her all the money he made from A Hero. There could be a prison term too.

I watched both films back-to-back, to mull over plagiarism itself. Grammys/Oscars go to covers, and remakes - everything real that inspires fiction is termed research. The issue therefore is that of theft - of credit. None, but an Iranian film, on the making of A Hero, can do justice to such a soft, delicate moral drama. Of course anybody, but Farhadi, should make it.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper