Who knows of Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui in India? Going by the crowds present for the screening of his film The Orange Suit at the 12th Osian’s Cinefan Film Festival in New Delhi last week, everyone, it would seem, absolutely everyone. The vast hall was chock-a-block and when his film’s screening was over, the director got a standing ovation. Why? Because The Orange Suit’s sticky subject — garbage — was spot on for the Indian heart. Plastic, glass, food, paper et al litters Iran like it does India: people there are as uncaring and irresponsible as here; deserts, beaches, streets, jungles, hillsides — all weighed down by pollution. These sights and smells infuriated Mehrjui. But the mess, he said was as much in the mind as on earth. “By cleaning your surroundings, you are supporting a change in you.” His film, he says, seems to have had an effect. “Students of a university located near the forest have launched a crusade to clean up the area.”
This energetic feature film with a social cause is almost Gandhian in its content. The story of a photographer (in an orange suit, whence the title) who takes pictures and sweeps the streets (swish, swish, goes the broom, literally and metaphorically, like a leitmotif) is also a story of the near-breakdown of his marriage.
Dariush Mehrjui is a phenomenon in Iranian cinema. He ushered in a New Wave in (together with Masoud Kimiai and Nasser Taghvai) with his landmark film, The Cow in 1969, way before the Islamic Revolution. In an interview with this writer, he confessed to being “sickened by the vulgarity of the films being then made. Lousy stories, fights and cabaret stuff.” Moved by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, he made The Cow, a film that was at once personal, social and philosophical. Set in an obscure village, it speaks of a man’s profound love for his cow. The cow dies mysteriously when he is away, and when he learns of her death he spirals downwards into madness and gradually begins resembling her.
The film, “an embodiment,” in Mehrjui’s words, “of his rebellion against the prevailing cinema, was like the French New Wave or Italian Neo-Realism”, and it catapulted him to international fame. Iranian cinema has not looked back since.
Dariush Mehrhui’s is a rich kaleidoscopic personality. A filmmaker, yes, but also a novelist and short story writer, a philosopher (he studied cinema at UCLA under Jean Renoir, then philosophy, and has authored a long philosophical essay, “The Grand Inquisitor and Intellectual Rogues” — with a chapter on totalitarianism — taking off from Dostoevsky), a painter and musician (he plays the santoor and the piano). He launched a literary magazine, Pars Review in 1964. All these threads, philosophy in particular, entered his subconscious and, within a philosophical framework, shaped his thought and work.
Mehrjui explained the seminal position of The Cow. “The film created a radical and dynamic change in Iranian cinema, it opened Iranian cinema to the world. And above all, it connected with the people.” Funded by the Shah’s regime, then banned for showing poverty and backwardness, it became an “embarrassment for a government which claimed it was on the threshold of a new civilisation. For them, the film did not represent any of these features.” It was smuggled to, and rapturously received by, the Venice Festival in 1971.
During the 1979 Islamic Revolution when, for three years, studios and film institutions were closed and cinema halls regarded as sacrilegious were burned, Ayatollah Khomeini saw the film and admired it.
The regime even praised it for “complying with Islamic criteria and telecast it, adding, in a twist, that it (the regime) was not against cinema “if it was educational.” “The Cow, says the director, “opened up a new path.”
And so with other films which have followed the same bitter and ironic trajectory — “the destiny of all my films. One was lost, others were banned.” Popular, and made with state support, they have been praised, awarded, banned and then revived. The Postman (1972) was first censored, then released. The Cycle (1978, on illicit blood trafficking), also made with state support, suffered a three-year ban because the medical community opposed it, and then released. The School We Went To (1980) was invited to Cannes but “confiscated because of its critique of despotism.” Mehrjui arrived in Cannes but the film didn’t. “It was butchered, and banned for 9 years.” Idem with Santoori (2007), whose script, “had been signed and sealed by the government.
The film had passed the censor and won awards. Suddenly, the minister decided it was inappropriate to show it.”
Why the bans? “My theory is,” says Mehrjui, “that when you produce a work of art that rises above the regular consciousness of the people or government, it is not understood. In such cases it is easier to ban it. If my cinema throws up new ideas, new ways of thinking, ‘they’ prefer to kill it. And then, the films are back on the circuit! It’s a black-and-white attitude.”
Mehrjui’s films — beguiling, candid, sensitive — are never the fruit of a deliberate choice. “It depends on the political situation and my own feelings. But I don’t like to repeat myself,” he adds. Several have been inspired by or adapted from literature. Sara (1992) was a loose adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, even “the ideas were changed to suit Iranian situations.” He needs, he says, “to identify with the internal issues and characters of a book, I need to appropriate them before adapting.” He was then attracted to J.D Salinger and Franny and Zooey, and inspired by it to make Pari (1995). Since the adaptation was not authorised, Salinger asked for a cancellation of a screening in New York.
“Salinger should have been happy, it was an art film, not a commercial one.”
Mehrjui has translated and staged Ionesco’s plays — The Lesson last year and The Bald Soprano more recently.
Dariush Mehrjui’s crop of twenty-four very different poetic and philosophical films have earned him 49 national and international awards.
In a long interview with Noushabeh Amiri in Cinemaya many years ago, Mehrui stated that he had been influenced by Nietzsche’s theory of pessimism. But for him, pessimism did not mean “a superficial lack of hope, but a profound perception which lies at the basis of culture, art and civilisation.”
For all that, despite the undisputed position he holds as the torch-bearer of the New Wave and his distinctly Iranian cinema language, Mr Mehrjui says that writing is his hobby. Cinema, his business.