‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Review: Exiled Iranian Director Shows A Conservative Family Split Apart By Protests In Heartfelt, Politically Fiery Melodrama – Cannes Film Festival

Stephanie Bunbury
·4 min read
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Woman, life, freedom. Down with theocracy! The slogans shouted in the bloody streets of Tehran over the past year echo through The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s long, heartfelt story of an Iranian family that starts to tear at the seams when Iman’s two daughters are told what he really does at the office.

“Do you know your father signs hundreds of death warrants every day?” shouts a young man to the girls a week later, when he is recognized in a remote roadside grocery store. By that stage, everyone knows what Iman (Missagh Zare) does at the office; his name and address are posted on the internet by dissidents. Iman seemed like a mild-mannered man when he was first introduced, but now those liberal thugs are coming for him. A man has to act. A man has to protect his family.

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Rasoulof has called up every possible genre in service of his subject, which essentially is a sustained condemnation of Iran’s murderous ruling regime. Appropriately, the story’s central motif is a gun. In the film’s first minute, we see half a dozen bullets being emptied onto a table in slow motion, a close-up of a revolver on a car seat and a distant view of a car driving up a mountain road at night. All the elements are in place for a classic thriller, but the ground shifts; now we are in the slightly stifling atmosphere of Iman’s household. When Iman shows his wife Najmeh the gun he was given by the Revolutionary Court to protect himself, she doesn’t want to touch it. She immediately recognizes it as an intruder.

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Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) is the gentle enforcer of his domestic regime, a true believer always ready with tea and painkillers – even in the middle of the night, like an attentive houri – but seemingly unable to picture what her husband job entails. As the riots escalate and the courts are jammed with protesters awaiting interrogation, flogging and sometimes execution, she wants to know why he can’t be home for dinner. At the same time, Najmeh is determined her girls – Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) is at college, feisty Sana (Setareh Maleki) is still at school – be beyond moral reproach, given their father’s position. They must respect the hijab; they must discard dubious friends. Meanwhile, in the girls’ shared bedroom, a revolution is afoot.

When the gun disappears from his bedside table, Rezvan is the chief suspect. Iman is determined to find it, but even more set on forcing his daughters to tell the truth. He can see he is losing them to the filthy lies told on TikTok. His job is almost unbearable; he wants to be respected for doing it. He sits them in front of their home movie camera, recorder of so many happy times in the past, to demand their testimonies. They say nothing. Maybe a professional interrogator will squeeze out their confessions. How did everything go so wrong?

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As Iman gets crazier and the loss of the gun looms ever larger, Rasoulof’s film slides heavily into melodrama; there are moments so vertiginously heightened that they become laughable. Cutting through that excess, however, is the undoubted power of immediate currency – this is news; this is right now – and the impressive collective commitment of cast and crew. It is remarkable that this film was made at all, given that Rasoulof was still shooting when his conviction for making work against Iran’s theocratic dictatorship was confirmed, sentencing him to eight years in prison. He has since fled the country.

Given this, it seems niggling to suggest he could have paid more attention to paring his film down, even as its stacked episodes of patriarchy gone mad start to feel as inexhaustible as Scheherazade’s store of bedtime stories. What is important is that everyone involved who remains in Iran is in danger, but they did it anyway. That tension infuses the storytelling with power and a particular, palpable energy, reflected in a suite of exceptional performances.

It is also an enjoyable rollercoaster, even in its most OTT sequences, as we anticipate what might happen in the next round of this family’s generational and ideological battle. The sacred fig of the title, as a short prologue explains, is a tree that seeds itself on other trees, sending roots into the air and eventually enveloping and killing the host tree to become its sacred self. Young women like Rezvan and Sana will win the struggle, that much is clear. They will put down their roots and they will inherit the earth.

​Title: The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Mohammad Rasoulof
Distributor: Neon (North America)
Cast: Missagh Zare, Soheila Golestani, Mahsa Rostami, Setareh Maleki
Running time: 2 hr 48 min

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