SFIFF53: The White Meadows

If there were any doubts about the political complexion of Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof's The White Meadows they have been effectively squashed by his (and editor Jafar Panahi's) recent arrest and detention by Iranian authorities. Rasoulof has just been released on bail, but Panahi has not yet been so fortunate. It's an ugly real-life coda to what in the film is the most subtle and haunting political critique imaginable. Viewers could be forgiven for lingering on the film's gorgeous surfaces (reminiscent of Shirin Neshat's black and white video work and of Pasolini's mythic themes and 'real' faces) or choosing to interpret its succession of poetic episodes as mysteries which have to do with the human condition generally. Shot among the dazzling salt-encrusted escarpments of Iran's Lake Urmia, the film's central character Rahmat rows his wooden boat between isolated communities; he attends a variety of rituals, collects the tears of those concerned and takes them away in a small glass bottle for purposes unknown until the last scene. The fictitious rituals bear close relation to any number of superstitious folk practices in human history, which is to say, they seem both strange and authentic. A beautiful girl is sacrificed as a bride to the sea; a dwarf is completely shaved and sent to the bottom of the village well to deliver wishes in sealed jars to the fairy who lives there; a boy who breaks a taboo is stoned. Every story segment, and the ritual at its center, is filmed with great attention to the symmetry which inheres in such practices and speaks to their function as specific forms of entreaty or atonement. Like individual lessons on the relationship between spiritual and aesthetic matters, they are parables about the art of magic, or the magic of art. Each vignette is linked by some visual refrain to the next, so that the bride who floats in a sea of burning bowls echoes the burial-at-sea of the boy in a graveyard marked by buoyant oil cans, or his ritual stoning earlier in a field of blanched posts. Dialogue is minimal, but realistic and, notably, quite funny; sounds (of crackling flames, tinkling glass, dripping wells, the slap of oars in water, or crunch of salt underfoot) are exquisite, and music is breathtakingly beautiful, including the strange notes of the lute which hangs from a tree and is plucked by the breeze. But such satisfactions as these, and they are considerable, are multiplied a hundredfold when you view the film as a political allegory, a representation of life in a theocracy with all of its absurdity, zeal, waste, loss, and sadness. The message is implied, and it makes itself felt in episodic and understated ways (the most overt being the 'rehabilitation' of the painter who refuses to see blue) but they accumulate quietly until the entire premise of the film can be seen to reflect and contain it. These crisp, white beaches blooming with fungal salt pilings and littered with dead birds are a representation of affairs generally, where people's very tears contribute in a vicious circle to their own sorrows as the environment grows weirder and less hospitable by the day. The sublime conclusion makes this reading clear, I think, though it too could be interpreted in different ways. What is indisputable is the perfection of the images, so delicately handled, so haunting in their mixture of tenderness and irony. It is difficult to imagine a more deeply felt, more deeply human meditation on the nature of folly and suffering than the one this incredible film affords us. It is a magical, subversive masterpiece, perfect in every way.