THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Tehran Law is a locomotive launched at high speed, a mad machine fueling its own energy and propelled at full speed, lasting more than two hours, without allowing the spectator to lower their guard and relax their attention. Saeed Roustayi’s second feature film is thus in the image of his main character, implacable, obstinate, angry, but also crossed by doubt and attentive to the violence of what he describes. Fake genre film, Tehran Law is above all a device in itself which, like a sensitive plate, exposes, from the stimuli that it triggers, a way, dialectical and not without ambiguity, of thinking about the contemporary Iranian state and the society that it understands. control.
From the first images – a chase between a small drug trafficker and a police officer – the film takes the form of a movement that will not stop. Samad Majidi (Payman Maadi) is the head of a unit of the Tehran Narcotics Squad. He seems to be guided only by one obsession: to bring to justice one of the biggest wholesalers and sellers of crack, a certain Nasser Khakzad (Navid Mohammadzadeh), as well as to dismantle the laboratory which supplies it. To do this, he will gradually go back to him by abusing various individuals, each constituting one of the links in the sector, from the consumer to the boss, including mules and resellers. This is the first part of the film, a succession of tense scenes, showing the irascible and logorrheic policeman exerting intense psychological violence in order to obtain results, that is to say the name of the next intermediary located on the chain of trafficking.
Dizzying class inequalities
One of the main virtues of Saeed Roustayi’s film lies in the way in which it reveals an unknown world, unsuspected, unprecedented in cinema, that of an Iranian society both plagued by corruption (the fact is mentioned several times) and ravaged through the use of hard drugs. Crossing all strata of society, from lumpenproletariat consumer to wealthy citizens through the middle classes, Roustayi describes a world shaped by insurmountable and vertiginous class inequalities. But social observation very quickly merges with the painting of a Dantesque universe, a theater of desolation and pure chaos, especially when the camera details immense construction pipes, in the heart of an industrial landscape, and at the hollows into which a whole haunted, scrapped, haggard, hopeless humanity is smashed.
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