HIFF 2020: There Is No Evil
HIFF
There Is No Evil, like Mohammad Rasoulof’s previous movies, represents a clear statement against the political system in Iran. Due to this the filmmaker has been condemned several times throughout his career and banned from making movies, receiving a similar treatment to another vastly known Iranian director, Jafar Panahi. This years Golden Bear winner tries to explore the moral consequences of Iran’s death penalty through four episodes, involving characters from different social classes.
The anthology structure has been used for years by various directors in order to explore the same theme through different lenses and points of view, such as Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, an effective exploration of acts of random violence suppressed by Chinese authorities. Both movies show how people are driven to commit ethical and desperate behaviours by different forces: the capitalism and the enforcement system in Zhangke’s, the government and the actual death penalty law in Rasoulof’s. Unfortunately though the latter doesn’t fully explore the interesting premise and uses it more as a prop to connect the four stories and in doing so the depiction of the main theme appears rather coarse and shallow.
Each episode has its own flaws; the first one follows the daily routine of Heshmat (Ehsan Mirhosseini), a quiet family man that keeps secret his job as an hangman. This chapter has solid acting from its main performer and a couple of great scenes but it ends abruptly once the audience discover the character’s job and there’s just not enough material to emphasise with Heshmat’s condition. While the second chapter feels more complete from a narrative perspective in depicting the story of Pouya (Kaveh Ahangar), a man who has just started his two years in military service and has to execute a prisoner, the story still has its niggles; the nature of its character is contradictory, the over emotional acting from Ahangar comes off as a distraction and the musical choice of Bella Ciao feels forced and out of place. The third story revolves around Javad (Mohammad Valizadegan) a young soldier who has killed someone close to his girlfriend’s family and how this event will change the nature of the relationship between the two of them. Gorgeously shot with some exquisite use of natural landscapes, this section fails to engage its audience because of the dull acting from Valizadegan and once again a premature end that will leave a sour taste to the viewer. Things don’t get better in the last and least engaging chapter as Rasoulof examines the reasons why Bahram (Mohammad Seddighimehr), an old phisician, lives as an outcast.
Mohammad Rasoulof’s intentions are clear as he wants to show in each episode that “there is no evil” in the actions those people commits and how these can affect the person from a moral and ethical point of view, nevertheless the Iranian director fails to craft a cohesive movie that explore this theme effectively.