THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
In a Tehran beaten by incessant rains, where the apartments are leaking, a couple gradually discovers the existence of another couple of perfect look-alikes – the two pairs are moreover played by the same duo of actors, Taraneh Alidoosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh. The former, modest craftsmen, are expecting a child, while the latter, more socially elevated, struggle with a dispute of a private nature: the husband must stoop to apologize to the family of a colleague he has beaten up and sent to the hospital. From the unexpected encounter of these two mirrored foci will arise all sorts of shifts and fatal transfers.
Mani Haghighi’s eighth feature film (Pig, Valley of Stars) seems at first to brandish the seductive hypothesis of an Iranian fantasy. Gold, The Persian Shadows is located further below, at this point of inflection where the troubled regions of the strange flare out into a social fable, even into a psychological drama. In fact, his two pairs of doubles inspire the director less with a line of flight towards the imagination than with a discourse on social roles and their interchangeable character.
Generalized smoothing
In contact with each other, the two couples will weaken, metamorphose and, why not, recompose. Within this new quartet, everyone’s anxiety thus consists in feeling insidiously ousted by their respective copy, swept out of the equation. Like Farzaneh, a pregnant driving school instructor, who feels her husband slipping away from her throughout, and remains powerless in the face of the complicity that develops between him and an improved version of herself.
To his favorite, The Persian Shadows is akin to a brilliant scriptwriting mechanism, leading its unlikely postulate towards the confrontation of different sociological profiles: violent machismo of the rich husband, crushed humility of the poor, unrepentant bovarysm of the wealthy wife, terminal depression of the other.
We regret, however, that starting from such a principle – the motif of the double pushed to the square – the film does not dare to let go of ballast and invent truly extraordinary situations, more daring and more powerful knots of fiction. The same goes for the staging, globally functional, victim of a generalized smoothing, caressing more willingly the anemic aesthetics of the film dossier than the chasms of dispossessed identity. Still too attached to certain conventions, Mani Haghighi makes the marked choice of meaning rather than vertigo.
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