The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)

PG-13 which, honestly, is pretty baffling.  Maybe it's because America is wired to be afraid of only sex stuff in R-rated movies.  But let's assume that the fictional gore wasn't enough to earn it an R-rating.  I'm referring to a scene where a character takes shotgun pellets to the face, potentially losing the eye in the process.  The movie, as a form of protest to the Iranian government in real life, show real world death footage from the Internet.  It's throughout the film.  Also, characters are tortured and killed.  Still, somehow PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Mohammad Rasoulof

My eye is twitching from stress and annoyance.  That's a thing.  What I have to do is to try to distance myself from an annoying day and try to write about The Seed of the Sacred Fig with objectivity.  Because I'll say this as clearly as I can: The Seed of the Sacred Fig is an accomplishment both from a political position and from a cinematic position.  Is it a perfect movie?  No.  It absolutely does not need to be as long as it is.  But at the end of the day, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is too important to be forgotten, which unfortunately, it probably will be.

It's kind of a glorious thing to live in an era of Wikipedia.  While I try staying intentionally blind to anything about a movie before watching it, especially when it comes to the Academy Awards, it definitely helped to know the backstory of this movie.  The movie is strongly anti-theocracy.  It is a direct criticism about the Iranian government.  Now, that's a gutsy move to begin with.  The Iranian government is notorious for its obsession with censorship.  The very nature of an Iranian film criticizing the Iranian theocratic regime is insane.  But the fact that this movie was quasi-made in secret?  I've seen one other movie made in secret.  It didn't look like this.  As a film, every bit of this looks impressive as can be.  I don't deny that a lot of the movie takes place inside an apartment, limiting the danger of filming something that might get the actors or the director imprisoned.  The director, during the filming of the movie, found out that he was to be imprisoned and knocked out the movie in 80 something days.  

And I'll tell you this, narratively, the story works really well.   It takes a minute to figure out what the story is about.  I can't help but bring Persepolis into this because Persepolis is what taught me about the theocracy in Iran, especially when it came to fighting oppressive regimes.  Like Persepolis, The Seed of the Sacred Fig spends a lot of time explaining the real world setting of Iran.  The entire first act is almost meant for foreigners who are unaware of the social structure of modern Iran.  We meet the girls (who have to be older than what they're playing.  No judgment!  I'm a big fan of saving younger actors from dangerous or unhealthy situations.) who almost epitomize the duality of what it means to be a woman in Iran.  Yes, we get strong characterization for these girls.  We get to know their intentions and personalities. But the real use of the first act is to show how violent the world has gotten in Iran.

When the story turns to give attention to Iman, it's actually kind of shocking.  I read Iman to be a minor character in the story for a good chunk of the narrative.  He's the threat that's out there.  Najmeh seems to come down on the girls because their 21st century behavior might offend him.  But the first act feels like it is a story of a mother who keeps using the father as an excuse to keep her children repressed.  When Sadaf becomes friends with the girls, it is almost a galvanizing of a new age.  That's honestly what I thought the story was going to be about, how Sadaf makes a tiny crack in these girls lives and Mom is going to have to see on which side of history that she stands on.

But the loss of the gun is when the film shifts.  Listen, I took the movie mostly seriously.  It's incredibly bleak and tense throughout.  But, man, Iman is not good at his job.  The movie starts with him having a bit of a conscience.  He's horrified that he has to sentence someone to death without ever having investigated this man.  It seems like he's a good dude (which I think is the point.  We're supposed to see how easily he's corrupted.)  But Najmeh is afraid of this guy from the beginning.  All of Najmeh's excuses are because "Father wouldn't tolerate any of this."  There's this fear of this man who seems like he has a soul at the beginning of the story.  There's something a little muddy about Iman's embracing of a structure that he fundamentally hates.  The problem is that Iman has two fundamental problems with his character: he doesn't believe that his work has a moral core and that he's bad at his job.  The first issue, which is far more important, is undercooked at the expense of the second point, because that guy makes every mistake in the book.

Once the Sadaf story is concluded, the real story of Iman and his spiraling out of control begins.  And, yeah, it's compelling.  I like the idea that a father / husband can turn on his family for the sake of a perverted sense of faith and duty.  Iman becomes this maniacal bad guy and he's truly scary...even though he isn't great at his job at being competently evil.  All of his motivation is that his family is spitting in the face of God with their obsession with freedom and progressiveness.  Unfortunately, there are moments, in an attempt to make Iman a  valid threat, that the movie gets a little silly.

These aren't bad moments.  They were just moments that pulled me out of the movie.  I had to be this guy, because these moments are so stupid that I can't help it.  The entire last act is meant to almost be an action thriller.  The girls go from being ideologically threatened (fighting a battle of willpower) to literally having to escape their father, who has locked them up in individual cells.  The individual cells is a weird moment for me.  The reason that the family is out in the middle of nowhere is because Iman got doxxed and the family's life is in danger.  Okay, that's interesting.  The family escape a protestor who is following them and Sana saves her father.  It seems like Sana is going to be on Dad's side for the conclusion of the movie. But the movie throws that moment out to provide a more climactic ending. 

That moment when Sana turns on the protestors and reveals that they have no bars, that's a big moment for Sana.  Sana, for a good chunk of the movie, has her allegiances a bit guarded.  While she tends to hang out with her sister, Rezvan, Sana almost echoes what she hears.  But in the moments before Dad is about to murder these people on live camera, we discover that it was actually Sana who stole the gun.  She doesn't even tell Rezvan that it was her.  (Although Rezvan probably could have figured it out.)  Now, there's a read of this that is also pretty accurate.  The reveal of the thief wasn't to protect Iman.  The purpose of revealing the gun and the lack of phone signal was to save the protesters.  But it is almost a fight for her dad's soul.  I get this.  But we don't really get the wrap up from this because Dad goes more nuclear as the story progresses.

The weird part that pulled me out was that this safehouse in the middle of nowhere had individual jail cells.  Now, I can write off the fact that this safe house was provided by his weird buddy (who seemed to really enjoy Iman's constant failure.  Am I the only one who read that in the character?) But do all safehouses have secret dungeons for torturing your family?  Part of this is that the movie needed Iman to make a definitive move against his family that would have seemed realistic.  While I believe that he was open to the notion of murdering them after they had escaped, it probably would have been a bridge too far to have Iman instantly jump to murdertown as his go-to response to being questioned or embarrassed.  It all seems incredibly escalated, considering that I see some plausible solutions to still keep him evil and simultaneously grounded.

I think I want to like this movie more than I actually did.  It hits a lot of amazing points and the story behind the making of this film is inspiring.  But it also feels like three separate films and often, character motivation is a bit all over the place.  Does that come from having to film it in secret?  Does it comes from having a limited shooting schedule?  There, after all, were few opportunities to reshoot sequences or fix it in post.  But it's a good movie that's important, but I never quite get to "great movie."