2023-07-19 01:04:00
This week, “Libé” (quickly) saw an oppressive Iranian drama and a Moroccan thriller where two people left behind go ever deeper into the gloom.
Against a backdrop of completely uncontrolled weather and rampant paranoia, a man (Navid Mohammadzadeh) and a woman (Taraneh Alidoosti) discover in Tehran a couple resembling them exactly (played by the same people). What follows is a trail game through empty stairwells and distressing corridors imagined by filmmaker Mani Haghighi and his co-writer, playwright Amir Reza Koohestani. Les Ombres persanes plays briefly with the combinatorics suggested by this initial situation, summoning science fiction above all to develop a tortuous labyrinth of existential meditation on free will and determinism whose interest fades, all awareness being conditioned to an initial situation fabricated from scratch. The exercise becomes exhausted and the echoes end up seeming a little vain, closing the film on itself in a claustrophobic way.
Persian Shadows, by Mani Haghighi, with Taraneh Alidoosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh
Awarded a jury prize Un certain regard at the last Cannes festival, Les Meutes, first feature film by Moroccan Kamal Lazraq, follows the nocturnal wandering of a father (Abdellatif Masstouri) and his son (Ayoub Elaid) responsible for get rid of a corpse in the underbelly of Casablanca. They killed the man without wanting to, during a story of settling scores following the death of a dog during an ultra-violent fight (the opening scene of the film) and their sticky bad luck goes stick to their bodies all night long, each obviously poorly executed attempt ending in failure and pushing the two left behind ever further into the murky and absurd. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” says the Anglo-Saxon maxim – a world where dogs eat dogs. Here they also eat men, the film wallowing in its sinister bass line to the end.
Les Meutes, by Kamal Lazraq, with Ayoub Elaid and Abdellatif Masstouri
#Persian #Shadows #Packs #sadness #Libération