‘The Great Yawn of History’ Review: A Treasure-Hunt for Certainty in Iranian Caves

Aliyar Rasti’s excellent Iranian feature debut, “The Great Yawn of History,” wrestles with faith and disillusionment during a woebegone treasure hunt. Pious, middle-aged Beitollah (Mohammad Aghebati) believes his recurring dreams of finding gold coins at the end of a dark cave. But since picking up lost money is haram — or religiously forbidden in Islam — he employs a world-weary young agnostic, Shoja (Amirhossein Hosseini), to accompany him on his journey, resulting in a tale that’s as mysterious and melancholy as it is wryly funny.

The film is sold first and foremost by its precise performances. Both leading men appear to conform to specific types, between the overbearing Aghebati’s sharp, to-the-point delivery and Hosseini’s worn-out demeanor, burdened posture and sunken eyes. The contrasting energies they bring to the screen imbue their trip from Tehran to the rural landscape with withheld, sardonic wit, but Rasti never loses sight of the spiritual questions in the characters’ peripheries. Bit by bit, both actors unpack more complex layers to their characters, between Beitollah’s lingering doubts about his own convictions and Shoja’s detachment from the modern world, as a young man so desperate for work he’s willing to go along with this superstitious scheme.

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The specter of Iran’s staggering youth unemployment looms large over the story, right from the moment Beitollah begins luring in wayward young men for a job interview by dropping counterfeit American $100 bills on the ground. While he doesn’t reveal the specifics of the job up front, his probing questions about the candidates’ respective beliefs paint a portrait of desperation, and he seems to pick the most desperate and cynical of them in Shoja, despite the job’s religious nature.

This prickly paradox lies at the heart of their dynamic — one with an undercurrent of paternal disconnect and disapproval — and complicates it at every turn. By the nature of Beitollah’s plan, the two men must exist on opposite ends of a moral spectrum if they’re to succeed. However, believing in this scheme in the first place is a conundrum unto itself, one that pulls them both from their respective extremes toward a murkier moral center. What they believe might seem solid on the surface, but it’s ultimately forced to be pliable — often in secret, or in ways they won’t admit — thanks to their economic circumstances.

The sun never seems to shine fully on them as they make their way to various crevices, embedded in dangerously vertical hillsides. Rasti and cinematographer Soroush Alizadeh create a hazy atmosphere that casts the two men’s endeavor in uncertainty during the day, while enveloping them in shadow and dim gaslight during nighttime conversations with local villagers, as they suss out info on local caves. Each encounter feels dreamlike. Their journey might seem ill-fated, though a slim possibility of finding the treasure always remains.

As the characters’ vulnerabilities and self-doubts grow more distinct, their interactions become simultaneously funnier and more despairing — all in all, they grow more familiar. The visual framing goes to great lengths to enhance these shifting, overlapping tones, whether in wide shots that capture Beitollah and Shoja’s insignificance against the natural landscape or in tight close ups in profile that track them as they move, making the backdrop whiz by, imbuing the frame with momentum as they bicker. The more despondent the details we learn about them, the more eye-wateringly funny their snappy interactions become, and the more exciting the filmmaking gets as it juggles these modes of expression.

As Rasti combines the worlds of faith and superstition with desperate negotiations rooted in economic downturn, his keen eye ensures that light, camera, shadow and blocking always take unexpected form, making “The Great Yawn of History” a constant delight, even at its most meditative.

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