THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
Here, another Iranian thriller! Any honest cinephile still has in mind the strong impression made on him, when it was released in France in January 2021, Tehran Law, by Saeed Roustayi. Its rawness, its political impact, its figurative audacity. So it’s a chance for Black market, of Abbas Amini, to fall into the wave, so to speak, at the same time, of course, as a risk when the cinema lover, passionate about tricky, likes nothing more than comparing his favorite objects.
So let’s say first of all that Black market has nothing to envy to its predecessor in terms of fit. See this opening shot, which lines up three frozen corpses under blue light in the cold room of a slaughterhouse. Who are they ? Why are they dead? Accident or murder? The film will have to answer these questions. In the meantime, the director is already setting up one of those improbable scenes where melodramatic pathos disputes him with the actual criminal intrigue.
Perverse variation
Slaughterhouse keeper Abed, terrified that the case will fall on him, negotiates with the plant manager – a bad guy who takes advantage of his employee’s fear and gives the impression of learn more than it says – the best way to make bodies disappear. He calls his son, Amir, recently expelled from France, to help him in this task. A leg prosthesis, a crisp Iranian detail, comes off during the laborious operation. Above all, Amir, a colossus, will have had time to threaten his father’s boss for his way of speaking, before the story, curiously, brings them closer together.
A perverse variation around the filial relationship is grafted onto the actual criminal intrigue, Amir gradually moves away from a father whose smallness and rigidity of mind he despises, to become the boss’s assistant. of the slaughterhouse. At the same time, the business is moving forward. A trail of dollar trafficking against the backdrop of the economic crisis is emerging. And while the boss of the slaughterhouse is threatened with bankruptcy, the children of one of the missing also land at the guard, and will not let go before having found his trace. So here are so many threads drawn by the director to brush a kind of film noir of the economic embargo, while giving the impression of not having known how to tie these threads correctly. Black market depicts a reality in pieces to us, it will logically be appreciated by its scraps.
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