Dragon Arrives!, A (2016)
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Review #1,342 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Mani Haghighi
Cast: Amir Jadidi, Ehsan Goodarzi, Homayoun Ghanizadeh
Plot: An orange Chevrolet Impala drives across a cemetery towards an abandoned shipwreck in the middle of a desert landscape. It is the 22nd of January, 1965. The day before, the Iranian prime minister was shot dead in front of the parliament building.
Genre: Adventure / Mystery
Awards: Nom. for Golden Bear (Berlin)
Runtime: 105min
Rating: PG13 for some sexual references
International Sales: The Match Factory
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
You
haven’t quite seen how Iranian cinema can be mutated until you have seen A Dragon Arrives!. In competition for the Golden Bear at the
Berlin International Film Festival, the film is unclassifiable and difficult to
explain. It is one of those head-scratchers
that is puzzling not just in its content, but in its form and very
existence. So let me try to articulate what
you can expect from the film, without revealing anything substantial.
A Dragon Arrives!
is a political mystery wrapped in some kind of meta-structure that privileges a
fusion of genres and realities. There’s
so much going on that it is easy to be confused, not to mention that the film
has no qualms in torturing you in that way.
The rewards are not exactly enlightening, but it is a stylish and
one-of-a-kind journey worth taking.
It
starts off with an interrogation sequence, presumably the aftermath of a
political assassination that allegedly sparked a suicide from a prisoner. As the film unravels, director Mani Haghighi gives
us a surreal flashback trip to a huge, rusty ship stuck in the middle of the
desert. The film also intercuts with
documentary footage of Haghighi speaking about how his grandfather's film—The Brick and the Mirror (1965), a
landmark Iranian work by Ebrahim Golestan—is linked to aforementioned events.
The
blend of fiction and reality, reenactments of the past, and the constant
probing for truth and closure do echo such Iranian films as Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990), but A Dragon Arrives! plunges headfirst into
unchartered territory with its playful, even subversive treatise on genre.
In
particular, Haghighi's picture is a rare Iranian film that references elements
of the Western (the desert landscape is no less harsher or spectacular than
Monument Valley), while doubling up as a pseudo-detective movie (a character wears
a hat and suit like a hardboiled investigator in an American noir). Perhaps most prominently, the central
characters travel in a bright orange Chevrolet Impala.
If
all these aren’t symbolic of the film's conscious embracement of Westernized
aesthetics, and a complete overturn of the social realist ideologies and raw aesthetics
that have grounded what we have come to know as Iranian cinema, then its all-too-obvious
contextual irony would have been lost.
Backed
by thumping, energetic, almost heavy-metal-ish music, A Dragon Arrives! will leave you fascinated and perplexed in equal
measure. This is no doubt a sheer oddity
of contemporary Iranian cinema.
Verdict: There’s so much going on in this stylish
fusion of genres and narrative styles that you will be left fascinated and
perplexed in equal measure—what a sheer oddity of contemporary Iranian
cinema.
GRADE: B+
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