Downpour (1972)

Not rated.  The movie is  pretty tame, honestly.  There's some violence that leads to blood.  What little sexual content that might be gleaned comes from innuendo, and even that is pretty tame.  Two of the main characters get drunk and try to kill each other in a silly fashion.  Honestly, there's nothing to really object to here.

​DIRECTOR: Bahram Beyzaie

Hey guys.  Fun fact.  Weebly, the service I use for this blog, often will cut off the bottom of my posts.  It's an easy fix if I know it happens.  The thing is, I often don't know. Now, the responsible thing would be to read my blog after I post it.  Then, I could make up for the wealth of typos I include.  But also, I have zero-point-zero seconds for that.  If you feel that the blog is somehow incomplete, just let me know in the comments.  I then get an email alerting me that someone is reading these things. 

Also, there was no scenario where I was going to get an image from Downpour in the proper aspect ratio without a watermark, so let's just live with what I got here.  

I'm forever going to be grateful to the film introductions that Martin Scorsese does for all of these movies.  That degree of cultural context makes these movies fascinating for me.  For those who don't know, Downpour is a find.  Almost every copy was destroyed by the Iranian government post-revolution.  The copy I saw was the only copy left, owned by the writer / director in a really crappy form.  It had English subtitles on it that were already in the print, so those couldn't be removed in the restoration process.  As such, while I have gotten a really good understanding of this movie, I don't know everything because the subtitles...aren't great.  I'm genuinely shocked that Criterion or the World Cinema Project didn't try filling in the missing subtitles.  It's not a lot of them.  But there are a handful of lines that I have no idea what they are saying.  You might think that the original filmmaker didn't include these lines because they were unimportant, but often the subtitles we got would be the second half of a sentence and we had no idea what the first half was. Just a choice.

Golly, I have to say that I'm instantly clouded by the influence of Woody Allen by this movie.  It's not Woody Allen-esque, by any means, by the way. But the lead looks like an Iranian Woody Allen in his heyday and it is a romantic story told from the male perspective where the woman barely has any say in her investment in the relationship.  The tone of Downpour is bizarre.  It is a comedy.  I don't even want to give it the title of dramedy, because the jokes of the movie, when there, are so broad that it would only work in an outright comedy.  But there's a story here that is dramatic and rich while the jokes are keeping the story moving.  Maybe this is true about Iranian film.  I can't say I have a rich understanding of Iranian film.  That's why the World Cinema Project exists, to draw attention to countries that tend to get neglected by Western audiences.  I will say, as a romance, it mostly works.  As a story of the outsider inspiring children, it really works (better than Dead Poets Society).  But as a comedy, less so. 

I'll talk about the comedy first because I want to talk about the good things as the blog progresses.  I don't know what the expectations of audiences are in Iran.  I kind of saw the same thing with my limited experience with Bollywood, especially with a movie like 3 Idiots.  Maybe it's the fear that Americans have with mixing genres, but it felt like there was this intense dramatic throughline and then there was absolute goofiness.  When I'm talking "goofiness", I'm talking about drunk guys falling over each other scenes.  Unchoreographed, drunk guys falling over each other.  There's a cart that goes out of control and he breaks his stuff.  How wacky!  But then there's also this moment that is incredibly intense.  Mr. Rahim, the Bluto to Hekmati's Popeye, is beating on this shrimpy little guy who is rumored (note!  Just rumored!) to have a crush on his fiancee.  "Fiancee" is a strong word because it is really ambiguous what Atefeh things of Rahim.  It's perhaps my favorite scene in the movie because it isn't played for laughs.  Rahim starts lightly smacking him, initially just to be insulting.  But the slaps end up with Hekmati bloody and stumbling to teach a class to maintain a sense of dignity.

It's some powerful stuff.  This is where the comedy really bothers me sometimes.  A lot of this movie works as a drama between two people who must consider a relationship from a distance.  (While I think that Atefeh is wildly under-represented in the film, I can at least imagine the filmmaker's intent with the romance.) It is also that old chestnut about getting a group of ragtag kids that no one believes in and get them to love education.  (I'm not quite sure where Mr. Hekmati inspires them to love education, but he did work at getting the theater gorgeous for them.) In terms of drama, as simple as these plots are, there's something universal and vulnerable in these moments. It's solid storytelling, plain and simple.  The guy is adorkable.  The girl is out of his league.  There's a reason that we keep coming back to this well and these scenes are beautifully shot and beautifully acted.  And all this makes me wonder...why the comedy?  It's this tonal shift from these moments that work.  I am going to talk about the drunk fight again.  Beyzaie wants to end the movie with everyone sad about Mr. Hekmati's departure (with the exception of the principal, who becomes outright villainous in the final act).  He even wants Mr. Rahim to mourn the loss of Hekmati.

So he has the two fight to the death while drunk ahead of time.  Now, that sounds silly, but if I squint, I can see how someone like Mr. Rahim would only respect someone who stood up to him and gave him a run for his money.  (Hekmati, previous to this moment, attempted retribution for the beating he got, but only received another beating.) So there's a way to pull that off.  Make Rahim swing his sword (which, that joke kind of lands), miss.  Rahim has the chance to kill him.  Instead, have him push Rahim over and offer the mercy that Rahim wouldn't give.  That might work.  Instead, it gets to be what a child thinks that drunkeness is.  The bigger problem is that this is a dark part of the story.  They have just mourned the dead.  Atefeh is losing her grandmother (?) To cut between these serious moments with wackiness is just the wrong choice. And I think I might be just ignorant about expectations of film because that's the only reason I would see to make a movie this way, especially considering how much talent there is in the film.

Because here's where the movie succeeds:  characterization.  Mr. Hekmati goes from unlikable to remarkably likable (despite the fact that he doesn't really give Atefeh a lot of agency over their relationship, but I also have to realize that I'm talking about 1972 Iran, which is loads more progressive than what will be coming around the corner).  Beyzaie gives Mr. Hekmati a justified reason to be a jerk.  He's the fresh fish in a town that doesn't want him.  He is alone and people assume the worst about him.  He's teased and mocked because of his diminuative stature and that explains the scorn that he seems to carry for this town.  He has a come-to-Jesus moment (probably not the best term for this situation) and learns that he could be quite welcomed here.  He does something altrustic, turning romantic frustration into something productive.  The second that he stops thinking about himself, he becomes this charming character that, thanks to master craftsmanship by both Bahram Beyzaie and Parviz Fanizadeh, stays true to the character we met at the beginning while growing into someone we can really root for.

Okay, it's a little cornball when he walks across the desks to give out the prizes.  But the sentiment is there.  It's interesting.  Because it's a movie and we don't want to watch a guy washing floors and painting walls for days, the movie shows the building of the theater in montage.  But it doesn't feel like montage.  The movie allows the feeling of scope and scale when it comes to the repair of the theater.  Yeah, it's montage, but it almost feels like updates on what Mr. Hekmati is doing with his time.  I don't have a clear connection with the repair of the theater and the imagery of the eponymous downpour, but there is one.  Even the notion of a downpour, especially in the desert regions of Iran, has the elements of catharsis.  Mr. Hekmati spends every night until midnight repairing this theater and when it is almost done, we get this downpour.  The imagery that ties the two things together is Hekmati being covered in splattered paint and then going out in the rain, but I'm doing a little bit of the connection there.  But the downpour, it is effective.  While the movie isn't about a downpour, I can see why the film takes the title for that scene.

My frustration is that this could have been a gorgeous and simple movie.  It crushed in Iran.  I can see why.  It is incredibly entertaining.  It has characters we root for.  But I can't stop grumbling about most of the comedy, especially the drunken fight.  Every time I get invested in the movie, there's a visual gag that pulls me out.  That's a me thing.  But on the whole, a good time was had.