#Sahar Goldust

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Seen in 2022:

A Hero (Asghar Farhadi), 2021

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قهرمان / A Hero Asghar Farhadi. 2021

Driving Ali e bne Hamzeh Holy Shrine, Shiraz, Fars Province, Iran See in map

See in imdb

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A Hero (Ghahreman), Asghar Farhadi (2021)

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A Hero (قهرمان) (Ghahreman) (2021) Asghar Farhadi

January 29th 2022

[leblogdemarinaetjeanmarie]

MARDI 21 DÉCEMBRE 2021 (Billet 1 / 4)

« UN HÉROS » (2h 07min)

Un film iranien de Asghar Farhadi, avec Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust…

Le Pitch

Rahim est en prison à cause d’une dette qu’il n’a pas pu rembourser. Lors d’une permission de deux jours, il tente de convaincre son créancier de retirer sa plainte contre le versement d’une partie de la somme. Mais les choses ne se passent pas comme prévu…

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Encore une fois nous avons été victimes du « syndrome cannois ». Nous nous étions pourtant jurés…

En effet nous avons craqué et sommes allés voir ce film suite à d’excellentes critiques et un Grand Prix au dernier Festival de Cannes… malgré tout le mal que nous pensons de ce Festival qui ne récompense plus depuis des années, à quelques exceptions près (dont « Parasite »), que des films que nous, nous trouvons au mieux, surfaits, ou pire, inintéressants, voire nuls ! Attention, c’est un avis tout à fait personnel qui n’engage que nous…

Au Gaumont Convention, en ce dimanche après-midi, la salle était archi-pleine, les 2 premiers rangs inclus !

Dieu sait si nous avons aimé certains films de ce metteur en scène mais dans celui-là, passés les 3 premiers quarts d’heure, nous avons fini par nous ennuyer terriblement. Ce film souffre (entre autres) de 2 défauts majeurs : il est d’abord BEAUCOUP trop long et très bavard avec des palabres INTERMINABLES… et le personnage principal, le « Héros » justement, devient au fur et à mesure de moins en moins sympathique, une vraie tête à claques tellement son sourire sonne faux. Là où il est le mieux finalement, c’est sur l’affiche du film ! Son indécision est telle qu'on finit par douter de sa sincérité. Les femmes sont plus battantes, plus dynamiques… D’ailleurs tous les autres comédiens s’en sortent nettement mieux.

Bref, vous l’aurez compris, nous ne vous le conseillons pas. Marina lui a donné ❤❤, 5 sur 5 et JM seulement ❤❤.

[whileiamdying]

“A Hero” Makes a Mockery of the Heroic

Amir Jadidi stars as a man in need of favors in Asghar Farhadi’s film. Illustration by Raphaelle Macaron

Asghar Farhadi’s tale of family, community, and debts cranks up the moral suspense until we can hardly breathe.

By Anthony Lane January 7, 2022

The hero of “A Hero,” the new film from Asghar Farhadi, is a sign painter and calligrapher named Rahim (Amir Jadidi). As the story begins, he leaves prison and is driven up the wall. To be precise, up a cliff of pale rock, rich in elaborate carvings, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz. The cliff is the home of a necropolis, Naqsh-e Rostam, and Rahim finds it covered in scaffolding; climbing high, he greets his brother-in-law, the rotund and genial Hossein (Alireza Jahandideh), who is working at the site. The wind whistles gently around them, and Hossein brews tea, close to the tomb of Xerxes the Great, a Persian king who died almost two and a half thousand years ago. Rahim, by contrast, is on a furlough for two days, after which—not unlike Eddie Murphy in “48 Hrs.” (1982)—he must return to prison. Observing the scene, you feel dizzy at the doubleness of time. It expands and contracts, either stretching far into the distance or slamming shut.

Something else, however, makes you no less uneasy, and that is Rahim’s smile. It looks friendly and generous, but it’s also weirdly weak, and it can fade like breath off a mirror. This is clever casting on Farhadi’s part; we warm to Rahim’s crestfallen charm, and instinctively feel him to be down on his luck, yet we don’t entirely trust him, and the film proceeds to back our initial hunch. What led to his incarceration was an unpaid debt. His creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), is grave, dour, and disinclined to forgive, despite being related to Rahim by marriage. (Just to thicken the mood, Bahram is a dead ringer for the Mandy Patinkin character, Saul, in “Homeland.”) “I was fooled once by his hangdog look, that’s enough,” Bahram says of Rahim, and we can’t help wondering, Could the dog be fooling us as well?

Anyone who has seen Farhadi’s earlier films, such as “About Elly” (2009) and “A Separation” (2011), will know how cunningly he doles out information, piece by piece. Thus, in the new movie, we gradually realize that Rahim has an ex-wife; that she will soon be married to someone else; that, while he’s been locked up, his sister Mali (Maryam Shahdaei) has been caring for his son, a shy kid with a stutter; that Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), a young woman beloved of Rahim, is the boy’s speech therapist; and so on. These things are true, but they are hard to cling to, because they are bundled up with things that are not necessarily true—secrets and lies, in which Rahim is all too quick to acquiesce. And the bundling only gets worse.

The salient event in “A Hero” occurs before the start of the action. Farkhondeh, we learn, has stumbled on a bag of gold coins beside a bus stop. Gold! The answer to the prayers of the wretched! As on the necropolis, and in the Dickensian idea of being jailed for debt, the modern is interfused with the bygone. The film is full of cell phones and social-media posts, yet we are solemnly asked to believe in a rare discovery, shiny with temptation, that would not be out of place in the “Arabian Nights.” Such is Farhadi’s skill, needless to say, that we do believe. And such is Rahim’s pliability that we readily accept his next move. Despairing of selling the coins for sufficient cash, he arranges to seek out their rightful owner and restore them, as if he, not Farkhondeh, had found the treasure. This tactic of his, dishonestly honest, becomes a news item, and, with his furlough over, he winds up on TV as a model of transparency and probity. According to the prison authorities, Rahim “has proved with this act that one can prioritize good deeds over personal interest.” There you have it, freshly baked: a hero.

To reveal what happens after this would spoil the bitter pleasures of a tough tale. Much of the movie unfolds in tight spaces: offices, cars, corridors, and the living room of Mali’s house, where food is laid out to welcome Rahim on his brief release. Most cramped of all is the copying-and-printing store where Bahram works, and where a fight breaks out between him and Rahim—a scrappy and humiliating tussle that is caught on camera. Will the footage go viral, with disastrous consequences for Rahim’s cause? Is he not learning, the hard way, that any attempt to manhandle public opinion is bound to snap back in one’s face, and would the lesson be any different for his counterpart in an American drama?

If I had to pick a running mate for “A Hero,” it would be Preston Sturges’s “Hail the Conquering Hero” (1944), in which a well-meaning wuss is (a) acclaimed for his soldierly courage, despite not having served in the war, and (b) too compliant, and maybe too tickled by pride, to set the record straight. Tonally, the two films could not be further apart; Sturges skids toward anarchy, while Farhadi patiently cranks up the moral suspense until we can barely breathe. What both directors make plain, nevertheless, is that their heroes are not alone in their folly, and that if they teeter unhappily on their pedestals it’s because we—ordinary citizens, puffed-up officials, or loving kinfolk—are rash enough, and emotionally avid enough, to plant them there. Take the charity organizers who put Rahim up on a platform, in front of an applauding audience: Are they really moved by his predicament, or are they merely buffing their own credentials?

By a useful coincidence, “A Hero” arrives in cinemas (for viewers hardy enough to visit them) in the wake of Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that “A Hero” is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to “The Merchant of Venice” and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now. Granted, the here means Iran, and, in place of an ugly clash between Jewish and Christian jurisdictions, the legal and theological backdrop is exclusively Islamic; but listen to the tenor of the talk. “I don’t want to slander him, but I warn you,” Bahram declares of his debtor, “if he doesn’t pay me, I’ll denounce him.” Here is a story about bonds, breaches of promise, and the bearing of false witness; just as Shylock takes root at center stage, often consigning Antonio—the merchant of the title—to the wings, so Bahram grows ever more immutable in his grievance, and the hapless Rahim ever less deserving of our sympathy. Even his son is dragged into the tangle of his deceit. “A Hero” makes a mockery of the heroic.

Theatrical windows, these days, don’t stay open for long. Before you know it, they are closed and barred, and even respectable movies are hustled, with indecent haste, through the streaming door. A case in point: little heed was paid to George Clooney’s “The Tender Bar” when it landed in cinemas, before Christmas. Now, already, it has arrived online—the proper moment, I’d say, to repair an injustice and to give the film, with its nicely rubbed blend of roughness and delicacy, the chance it deserves.

The hero is JR. He is played as a boy of eleven by Daniel Ranieri and later, as a student at Yale and an aspiring writer, by Tye Sheridan. Everybody asks what JR stands for; everybody, that is, except the guy at the Times who takes him on as a trainee, and who tells him to change his name to J. R., with a couple of periods nailed on, if he wants a byline. Beneath such quibbling lies the primal wound of JR’s life—the absence of his father (Max Martini), a radio host whom he hardly sees, though he hears his whiskey-varnished voice on the airwaves. At one of their rare meetings, JR says, “A doctor at school says I have no identity.” “Jesus. Get one,” his old man replies. Martini has only a few scenes, yet each of them burns a hole in the film as if he were stubbing out a butt.

Requiring stability, JR and his mother (Lily Rabe) find it at the Long Island home of his grandfather (Christopher Lloyd), who is—you guessed it—crotchety but kind. Also in residence is Charlie (Ben Affleck), who is JR’s uncle, de-facto father, and—another good guess—a spigot of wisdom, pouring forth instruction in what he calls “the male sciences.” He’s an autodidact to boot, and there’s a wonderful shot of the young JR seated on a bed, facing a closet crammed with books. “What you do is, you read all of those,” Charlie says.

The gist of the critical response has been that “The Tender Bar” follows a well-worn path. Fair enough, but is that such a sin? (You should try the new “Matrix” movie. Now, that’s worn.) What counts is the firmness of the tread, and Clooney sets a careful but unloitering pace. Together with his editor, Tanya Swerling, and his screenwriter, William Monahan, he insures that the warmth of the tale—adapted from a memoir by J. R. Moehringer—doesn’t turn fuzzy in the telling, and that, as in any honest recollection of youth, the funny stuff is the flip side of pain. Hence the advice that JR receives from a pal: “When you suck at writing, you become a journalist.” No comment. ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 17, 2022, issue, with the headline “True Lies.”

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Filmpodcast Nr. 742: My Sunny Maad, A Hero, Wet Sand, Hebammen

Filmpodcast Nr. 742: My Sunny Maad, A Hero, Wet Sand, Hebammen #podcast #film #filmpodcast @srfkultur

Sahar Goldust in ‘A Hero’ (Ghahreman) von Asghar Farhadi © filmcoopi Heute kommen wir wieder mal weit herum in der Welt. Georges Wyrsch hat My Sunny Maad gesehen, den Animationsfilm, in dem eine Tschechin nach Afghanistan auswandert. Ich stelle Asghar Farhadis A Hero vor, dessen Held im Iran in einen eigentlichen Shitstorm gerät. Wet Sand spielt in Georgien am schwarzen Meer. Und Leila Kühnis…

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A Hero 2021 AkulTalkies.com

Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust, Ehsan Goodarzi, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Sarina Farhadi, Alireza Jahandideh, Maryam Shahdaei, Farrokh Nourbakht

https://www.akultalkies.com/a-hero-2021

[whileiamdying]

FILM REVIEW: Asghar Farhadi’s ‘A Hero,’ the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Film still from Asghar Farhadi's "A Hero." Image courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Farhadi’s narrative is far from neat. For, as the plot unfolds down intricate paths, it’s messy like life is.

BY LEONARD QUART  POSTED ON JANUARY 17, 2022

I have seen the body of the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s films. He won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar twice (for “A Separation” and “The Salesman”) and his new film, “A Hero,” won the Grand Prix at Cannes. In the main, his works are centered on life in modern-day Iran, evoking a world built on class and gender divisions that complicate individual behavior and decision-making even more than is usual for human beings living in the 21st century.

Farhadi is a social realist who looks at the dynamics of individual and familial interactions fraught with difficulties. Though he has avoided overt politics in his films, he writes of how he has had his passport confiscated and been interrogated at airports, been told not to return to Iran, and has remained silent in the face of the government’s “accusations and name-calling.” It’s hard to be an artist and maintain one’s own personal vision in theocratic, highly traditional Iran.

But in his films, what is central is his depiction of flawed characters — not symbolic political figures — making decisions whose moral ground is hard to define. Nothing is ever simple in the choices they must make; everything is laced with ambiguity, and they augment the confusion with evasions and half-truths. The characters are rarely explored internally, but seen in the context of the choices they make. Farhadi’s films depict ordinary situations and problems that can’t be easily resolved.

“A Hero” focuses on Rahim (Amir Jadidi), whose failure to repay a creditor, Bahram (the brother of his angry ex-wife), has earned him an ongoing jail term. The brother-in-law justifiably remains harsh and unforgiving, since his own daughter’s dowry has been erased by Rahim’s debts.

Rahim is a divorced father with a nervous tic-like smile and a gentle, halting manner of speech. He projects both decency and a haplessness conveyed by his inability to keep his life together. The jail is a debtors’ prison without bars, where the prisoners play soccer in a rec hall and can take leaves.

On a two-day leave, Rahim visits with his loyal sister and brother-in-law, who take care of his sweet-natured, stuttering son. He drops in on his totally enamored, secret girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) who has stumbled on a lost purse with gold coins, which hopefully will lead to Rahim’s redemption. So when Rahim advertises he would like to return the lost bag, the media pick up the story and cast him as a humble hero who has honorably forfeited a great deal of money to do the right thing.

It’s not only the media, but also the prison authorities who want to use Rahim’s act to garner positive publicity (“a model prisoner”) for their institution. But this moment of Rahim’s triumph — the acquiring of a charity’s gift in order to pay his debt — is suddenly undone by a tangle of half-truths that blur the nature of his story and reward. Still, one feels he is a man who is given to getting trapped often in morasses of this nature. Although his engaging in subterfuge and his willingness to drag his son along to arouse compassion makes his persona less sympathetic.

Farhadi’s narrative is far from neat. For, as the plot unfolds down intricate paths, it’s messy like life is. The conclusion is a bittersweet one, with a touch of moral redemption even though the idea for Rahim’s virtuous act is his girlfriend’s. There are no righteous or villainous people among the central figures, only ambiguous ones. But some of the power of the film is undermined by the excessive plot turns.

[whileiamdying]

A Hero’ (‘Ghahreman’): Film Review | Cannes 2021

Oscar-winning filmmaker Asghar Farhadi returns to his native Iran with this story about truth-telling, honor and the price of freedom.

BY DEBORAH YOUNG

A Hero' COURTESY OF CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

Perhaps owing to his work in theater, writer-director Asghar Farhadi seems able to find drama in the most surprising places. After his Spanish-set Everybody Knows with stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem and a string of short movies, he makes a welcome return to his native Iran with A Hero(Ghahreman), a very fine film about honesty, honor and the price of freedom.

The Iranian-French coprod is a small film in format, pointing it to art house fans who can pick over the director’s typical themes amid subtle symbolism and refined technical work. Its reception at Cannes, where it’s competing, should indicate how far a local film like this can go internationally.

Prisons are one of the key locations in contemporary Iranian cinema, both as overcrowded places of punishment and, naturally, of metaphoric confinement within a tough society. In A Hero, the prison is an open-door cage well-serviced by buses, where the working-class hero pops in and out, as his fortunes ebb and flow. It is through this door that the unemployed Rahim (Amir Jadidi) chooses his own fate. A far cry from the director’s middle-class drama A Separation, the first Iranian film to win the Academy Award for best foreign language film, A Hero returns Farhadi to the basics of national storytelling in an increasingly complex tale of half-truths and lies that eat away at all those who traffic in them, which is to say, everybody.

The setting is Shiraz and the first scene, in which we meet the honest but naïve protagonist, takes place on a sheer cliff face containing the royal tombs of Persepolis, where the kings of the Achaemenid Empire are at rest. Rahim, who has just been released from prison on a two-day leave, climbs up an excruciatingly high scaffolding strung with ropes; it seems in every way a place of death. In this symbolic landscape, he meets his friendly brother-in-law (Alireza Jahandideh) and together they discuss ways for him to repay the old debt that sent him to jail three years ago.

His creditor is another brother-in-law, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), a shopkeeper who embodies malice and pettiness. He has it in for young Rahim, who was formerly married to his sister, and does everything in his power to destroy his reputation and keep him in prison. On Rahim’s side is his own sister, his son and the new love in his life, Farkhondeh (played as a strong modern woman by Sahar Goldust), whom he hopes to marry as soon as he can pay off his debt and get back to work.

Farhadi’s screenplay thrusts the viewer into the middle of a murky story about a lost handbag. A woman waits to board a bus with a handbag containing 17 gold coins; but before reaching the next stop, she realizes the bag is gone. What we see is Farkhondeh light-heartedly giving the gold coins to Rahim. Together they try to sell them to a dealer, but the price is too low. It will not be enough to pay even half of the 150,000 tomans he owes Bahram for a business that went bust. With all doors closed to him and his conscience pricking, Rahim advertises for the owner of the bag and returns it to a poor woman who weeps with joy to get it back.

Next act. Word of his good deed gets around and the image-conscious prison authorities send over a TV crew to interview him. Jadidi is at his best showing Rahim’s naïve pleasure in being singled out as a hero, after a lifetime of being treated like a worm. Best of all, he becomes a hero in the eyes of his son, a serious boy with a speech disorder who seems old beyond his years.

But the publication of Rahim’s story in the newspaper and its airing on regional TV also excites jealousy, in no one more than the dark-hearted Bahram, who doubles down on being obnoxious and unfair and refuses to renegotiate Rahim’s debt.

At this point Farhadi’s web is woven and all he has to do is to pull the strings to tighten it around the hapless hero. People begin to cast doubt on his story and motivations. Cracks appear in the account, and Rahim is forced to update his version continually. When a charitable organization collects money to get him out of prison and find him a job, things really go wrong.

Interestingly for an Iranian film, the power of social media plays a huge role in the hero’s unraveling, and several plot points turn on whether or not certain facts will be posted and made public. Perhaps the film’s most moving scene shows a prison warden feeding lines of not-completely-true testimony to Rahim’s little boy, who bravely struggles to get through a few sentences being recorded on camera to improve his father’s image.

The film’s simple, lower-class setting is met with equally direct camerawork, lighting and editing. This feels like the farthest Farhadi has come from his stage work and the sometimes unconvincing dramatic elements that occasionally creep into his films (the sexual assault that comes out of the blue in The Salesman, for example). Here, instead, everything seems so probable that events have an archetypal quality — the bureaucrat who won’t accept Rahim’s job application even though it’s all been arranged, the charity queen who gets on her high horse over nothing, everybody’s stubborn insistence on being respected, when they show no respect for others. And the never-ending, instinctual chain of lies that enslaves the characters and gives the film its larger dimension. ❖

Full Credits: Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Production companies: Asghar Farhadi Productions, Memento Films Intl. Cast: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, Sarina Farhadi, Ehsan Goodarzi, Alireza Jahandideh, Maryam Shahdaei Director, screenwriter: Asghar Farhadi Producers: Asghar Farhadi, Alexandre Mallet-Guy Coproducers: Olivier Pere, Remi Burah Directors of photography: Ali Ghazi, Arash Ramezani Production designer: Mehdi Mousavi Costume designer: Negar Nemati Editor: Hayedeh Safiyari World sales: Memento International 2 hours and 7 minutes

[whileiamdying]

Holding Out for A Hero

Asghar Farhadi gives more moral complexity in his latest Oscar contender.

By Kristian Lin January 5, 2022

Amir Jadidi is "A Hero" whose life comes undone.

In the wake of Iran’s phony election of 2009 that re-installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, the country cracked down on its filmmakers, so Abbas Kiarostami died in France, Mohammad Rasoulof spent a year in prison, Jafar Panahi is still forbidden to travel outside Iran, and Asghar Farhadi — who won the only two Oscars in his country’s history — went to Spain to make Everybody Knows. Since then, Farhadi has felt safe enough to return to Iran to make his follow-up movie, A Hero, which opens at Grand Berry Theater and looks to be a leading contender for foreign film awards this year. I don’t think it’s the best Iranian movie of 2021 (that would be Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil, which I cited in my top 10 list), but it does give you more of the same moral sagas growing out of everyday life that has distinguished Farhadi on the world stage.

The main character is Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a calligrapher in the city of Shiraz who is incarcerated for failing to repay a loan from a former friend named Bahram (Mohsen Tananbandeh). During a two-day furlough from prison, Rahim’s girlfriend (Sahar Goldust) finds a woman’s purse containing gold coins. He decides to return the money to its rightful owner (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy), a timid woman whose husband has been stealing from her. The local press, encouraged by the prison officials, proclaims Rahim as a hero. That turns out to be the worst thing that could happen to him, because this is a Farhadi film.

Also because this is a Farhadi film, the movie contains about a dozen plot twists that take you by surprise without ever feeling arbitrary. The toxic element in this story is social media, as Facebook and YouTube users take to vilifying Bahram for refusing to forgive Rahim’s debt, and Bahram curses out the reporters and the prison administrators for casting him as the villain of the story. The prison officials, for their part, are seeking good publicity for themselves and point to Rahim’s good deed as evidence that their facility is rehabilitating its inmates. They rope in a private charity that offers to raise money to give Rahim a job. Rahim himself only returns the gold upon reckoning that it’s not enough to repay Bahram, and while his girlfriend does let him publicly take credit for finding the purse, he can’t resist ginning up his story for the press. That tendency comes back to bite him when questions arise about his story’s veracity and he turns from hero to liar in the public’s eyes. His family is reduced to seeking out the owner of the gold coins to vouch for him, knowing full well that it might put her in danger. If this were funnier, it might be a Preston Sturges comedy.

As it is, I’m not sure this is on the same level as Farhadi’s A Separation and The Salesman, although those films may have benefited by introducing us to this great filmmaker. Social media is a much different place in Iran, where you can be thrown in prison for posting the wrong thing (and oh boy, do you not want to be in an Iranian prison). Yet despite that, this movie shows us Iranian users subject to the same gullibility and mob mentality as ours. It’s all too easy to imagine a situation like Rahim’s here in America, as he and Bahram are caught in a spiral created by their own personal flaws and the spotlight that catches them. This gives A Hero its staying power and cements Farhadi’s status as a filmmaker whose work is not to be missed.

A Hero Starring Amir Jadidi and Mohsen Tananbandeh. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. Rated PG-13.