The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, A Chilling Testament  To The Trauma Of Totalitarianism

The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, A Chilling Testament  To The Trauma Of Totalitarianism

Rating: *** ½

  Iranian writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof’s  new blood-freezing film The Seed  Of The Sacred  Fig was  shot in  complete secrecy  without the  totalitarian government’s knowledge  or approval. This  explains  why the characters  , a man of the Establishment , his wife and daughters, look so  disturbingly stricken in the  film’s most  chilling moments of insubordination and  retaliation.

   This is not an easy film to sit through.  Its slowburn treatment of authoritarianism  and its bullish approach  to  officialdom’s dumb unquestionable fascism  tends  to throw us  off course. But then we settle down to witness what can only be perceived as  the rapid decline of values and  the  complete collapse  of the conscience.It gets sobering and scary.

There is  a longish sequence where  Iman’s wide cleans out a grisly facial wound of a girl who has been shot at. It is terrifying not so much for the sight of an open wound as for what it is trying to say about mob violence.

 The  film’s protagonist is Iman(Missagh Zareh) who has recently been appointed as an investigating judge by  the intolerant  Establishment.  Iman has the  thankless  job of bringing protestors  to punishment, including execution.

What happens when his own daughter  brings one of them home? This is the crux of the dramatic conflict spreading itself into sprawling morality tale  with twists  that  turn the  corkscrew of corruption  mercilessly.

 As Iman degenerates into a radical  monster , after his  gun is stolen(why is that incident such a trigger?) the  focus of  attention shifts from  him to his  wife Najmeh(Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters Rezvan(Mahsa Rostami) and Sana(Setareh Maleki).

The women in Iman’s family seem to run the show as he is  an absentee  patriarch  grappling  with the  demands of an authoritarian  regime.But then, things are never what they seem, not in a closed  society.

  The  third segment of this  chilling  testimony to totalitarianism is  not my favourite.

   Seen as metaphor on patriarchal inclemency , the concluding 45 minutes of this arching lengthy and excruciating “family drama”(done in  dark sinister shades, the  opposite of  what Sooraj Barjatya does  to the filmy family) are exacerbated  and unhinged.

 I am not sure that the  father’s overwrought  mental  condition and his clamping down on his wife and daughter can be perceived as anything more or less than a metaphor on absolutism. Is writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof showing the demonizing of Iman’s father as a microcosm of  monocracy?

The control that  Rasoulof  showed displayed within the four  walls  of Iman’shome dissipated  in the wide open.Freedom comes with  its own intrinsic restrictions.I am sure the director who fled  from Tehran to Germany knows this.