What I’m Seeing This Week: I’m dropping my loving wife and our dog Sally off at the family cottage in Ontario–our kids are there already with their grandmother–this weekend, then returning home alone to spend the rest of the month by myself before I join them all again in early August. During this time I’ll be at liberty to see as many movies as I want, and I plan to kick things off with screenings of both Thelma and Kinds of Kindness at Cinemapolis.
Also in Theaters: Inside Out 2, which I started writing about last weekend, is the best new movie in local theaters that I’ve already seen, but the quietly intense coming of age (sort of) story Janet Planet isn’t far behind. The former is at the Regal Ithaca Mall, the latter is at Cinemapolis. In addition to the films I’m seeing this week, I’m also hoping to catch the horror movies MaXXXine and Longlegs at one of those two theaters before it closes. Can You Still Love Me, the directorial debut by local filmmaker Adam Howard, screens at Cinemapolis on Sunday. Finally, your best bet for repertory fare is either Princess Mononoke, which is at the Regal Sunday through Wednesday, or The Lion King, which is there all week, depending on whether you’re more of a Studio Ghibli or Disney kind of person.
Home Video: Last week I promised a list of my five favorite films directed by Asghar Farhadi. Here it is!
5. A Hero (available on Prime Video). Not just a return to form after the relative disappointment of Everybody Knows–I could justify ranking this as high as third! I’ve been trying to avoid reflexively using auteurist terminology like “Farhadi’s A Hero,” etc. out of respect for the complexity of filmmaking, but I do still tend to organize my movie watching around individual artists (i.e. not just directors) in large part because I enjoy encountering the same techniques, ideas, and faces appear again and again and watching them accrue ever more complex and subtle meanings. Here the opening shots of Naqsh-e Rostam are some of my favorites in Farhadi’s entire oeuvre: it’s his signature house in a state of disrepair, except the house is the nation of Iran! Similarly, Amir Jadidi isn’t just playing Rahim, he’s also playing the side of Shahab Hosseini’s Hojjat that we don’t get to see in A Separation. Speaking of which:
4. A Separation (available on Prime Video). Farhadi’s first Oscar winner (for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year–it was also nominated for Best Writing, Original Screenplay) and considered by many to be his best film. Payman Maadi’s Nader is perhaps Farhadi’s best unlikeable protagonist, but what stands out most in my mind is Shahab Hosseini’s terrifyingly wild physicality in the role of Hodjat, which is even more striking because he plays one of the most sympathetic characters in Farhadi’s previous film About Elly, which I’ll discuss further in just a minute.
3. The Past (available for rental from Apple TV+ and Prime Video). Easily the most underrated film on this list. I think it can sometimes be challenging to encounter a familiar director working in another language or setting because it forces you to reconsider what exactly you like about them. In the case of Farhadi, I suspect that his movies introduced many Americans to an Iranian U.H.B. that they didn’t know existed; transplant them to France, and what previously felt like a bridge between the citizens of countries two whose leaders are antagonistic toward one another becomes a case of “yeah, well of course *they’re* just like us.” Farhadi is hardly the first filmmaker who had to learn from experience that a little flash goes a long way, and A Separation is his first movie after he truly got all of the “art school” out of his system, but it advances almost too far in the direction of neorealism. The Past has all of that movie’s virtues, but with more three-dimensional characters and a successful return to stylistic flourishes like shots of people talking who we can’t hear because we’re separated from them by soundproof glass which he didn’t yet know hot to utilize fully effectively in films like Beautiful City: in other words, it’s his most “mature” work to this point.
2. About Elly (current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access through Kanopy via a license paid for by the Library; it is also available for rental from Apple TV+). There’s also a lot to be said for youthful exuberance, though! I had never heard of Asghar Farhadi when I saw this movie at the Silk Screen Film Festival (RIP) in Pittsburgh, PA in 2010 and it absolutely knocked my socks off. Had I been making year-end top ten lists at the time, I’m nearly certain it would have come in at number one. So this could be a sentimental pick, but I also think that it’s a masterful portrait of people who spend so much time and energy trying to convince themselves and others that they’re living their best lives that there’s none left over for genuine empathy, which is of course also a recipe for political complacency, and Taraneh Alidoosti’s Elly flying a kite is pure joy.
1. The Salesman (available on Prime Video). Not just number one on this list, one of the best movies of the 21st century so far. From the House of Usher opening to the subtle intertwining of its plot and themes with the play-within-a-movie Death of a Salesman to lead performances by Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, my favorite Farhadi regulars, that draw power from the other roles they’ve played for him, The Salesman represents his richest and most original treatment of his main themes.
Previous “Ithaca Film Journal” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 