4

WHO KILLED THE TOUGH GUY?

Continuity and Rupture in the Filmfārsi Tradition

I heard that someone once said that in Protest, Kimiai represents the supporters of the reformist movement (dovom-e khordād) as a bunch of pizza-eating students. But who cares if students eat pizza and are also sensitive to the fate and status of politics in their country?

—MITRA HAJJAR, ACTRESS, PROTEST

Masud Kimiai’s popular film E‘terāz (Protest, 1999) represents the reformist movement as part of everyday life, as regular as pizza. Mitra Hajjar’s remarks about the film show that politics were not just the domain of the art-house films of the previous chapters. Rather, popular films were also pushing the boundaries of censorship and representing the reformist movement and other political debates onscreen. In one particularly representative scene from Protest, a group of young people sit in a pizza parlor and discusses politics. Although a complicated process of censorship had ensured that direct commentary about the political system remain offscreen,¹ the characters in this scene reference real politicians, organizations, and newspapers, and they include Khatami and other reformists in their discussions. The young people offer critical opinions that are representative of the kinds of debates that people were having in Iran at the time, during the second half of Khatami’s first term as president. This inclusion of open political discussion marks an extraordinary moment in Iran’s long cinematic history.

Kimiai’s camerawork reinforces the uniqueness of this political discussion. As the scene opens, a series of shot–reverse shots establish the viewer’s position at the table along with the characters. Warm colors and the close proximity of bodies add intimacy to the scene, and we as viewers participate in a private moment between friends. About halfway through the scene, however, the view abruptly swings up, and we go from sitting at the table with the students, fully engrossed in their political conversation, to perching in the rafters, where we are suddenly spying on the very conversation in which we were just participating. The initial framing of this new shot, in which the ceiling obstructs part of our view, contributes to the sense that we are watching something forbidden, and this experience highlights the rarity of open political commentary onscreen in Iranian cinema.

Protest, like other films from this period, broaches political themes in unprecedented ways. However, unlike the films of Kiarostami and Farmanara, Kimiai’s work echoes the midcentury popular films that made the director famous in the first place. Protest’s engagement with the filmfārsi tradition—the mode of popular filmmaking from the industrialization of the film industry in the 1950s through the revolution of 1978–1979—offers unique insights into the ways in which the film industry’s interactions with political reform refashioned popular genres, and it speaks to the ways in which filmfārsi functions as a point of continuity that destabilizes the idea of a revolution-driven rupture within cinema. The tough-guy genre is one of the cornerstones of the popular film tradition in Iran. This genre has been popular in mainstream Iranian cinema since the 1950s. A comparison between Protest and Kimiai’s most famous tough-guy film, Qeysar (Qeysar, 1969), reveals that Protest announces the death of the tough-guy genre in Iranian cinema, a death initiated not by revolution but rather by the rise of Mohammad Khatami’s reformist movement. This announcement is particularly ominous for Kimiai, whose body of work found articulation in the tough-guy genre for more than thirty years. But the demise of his tough guy was necessitated by transformations in the codes of masculinity in Iranian society, which came out of the popular discourse on which Khatami’s political platform depended. Protest’s investment in both Khatami and the history of popular film signals the extent to which reform affected the entirety of the film industry, and not just a select group of art-house films. Because Protest both appealed to and represents average Iranians, and not just a particular class of intellectuals, it speaks to the reformist movement’s integration into popular discourse, and it suggests the role of film in facilitating that move.

With Protest Kimiai directly addresses his earlier film, and he rewrites the narrative of violence that made Qeysar famous. This methodology—comparing two films separated by more than thirty years—allows operation outside of the typical pre- and post-revolution dichotomy. Instead, moments of continuity and rupture in Iran’s cultural history emerge, as does an explicit relationship between Protest and Qeysar, a connection that scholarship on Kimiai’s work has not yet acknowledged. By locating these films in the tradition of the tough-guy genre, it is possible to understand how each represents the ideals of masculinity and how, in turn, these representations of masculinity are informed by their political milieu. The differences in how these two films represent codes of masculinity establish an important shift, both cinematically and socially, and political reform is ultimately the impetus for this complex sociocultural transformation.

Masud Kimiai’s 1969 film Qeysar has been the subject of much critical debate, with some film critics hailing it as the start of modern Iranian cinema and others deploring it as a thinly veiled imitation of Western action films. Despite this disagreement, both the film’s success since its release and general scholarly agreement that it is one of the founding films of the Iranian New Wave have ensured its relevance and staying power among scholars and audiences alike.² The film captures a particular moment as Iranian society grappled with the corollaries of modernity, urbanism, and the rising rule of law. Qeysar revolves around the title character as he seeks revenge for his sister’s rape and suicide and his older brother’s murder. Qeysar chooses not to turn to the police or other law enforcement for help but rather seeks out each of the three Ab-Mangol brothers himself to enact his revenge for the crimes they committed against his family. Qeysar systematically hunts and murders each of the brothers in a location that stages Iran’s encounter with modernity: a bathhouse, a butcher’s shop, and finally a train station. His actions are driven by his desire to protect his family’s honor, a moral code that the viewer comes to respect and even accept. Despite the film’s incredible violence, Qeysar avails himself as a sympathetic character, and as the film ends with the injured main character hiding in an abandoned train car as the police close in, we hold onto the hope that he might escape before the police catch him.

The celebration of violence and the viewer’s sympathy make for a very dangerous film, one in which an individual’s moral code supersedes the laws of the state. Of course, violence had become part and parcel of cinematic spectacle around the world by the late 1960s, and Qeysar’s unrelenting violence is thus part of an international appeal to onscreen aggression, fighting, and bloodshed. The rise of onscreen violence at this time, even when represented uncritically, drew attention to the social and political conditions that breed violence in the first place, and it is no coincidence that the rise of cinematic violence occurred in tandem with the Third Cinema movement. In this context, it is easy to understand why film scholars such as Hamid Naficy and Hamid Reza Sadr have suggested that Qeysar captures and perhaps even promotes the fervor that would eventually lead to the revolution of 1978–1979.³

Released thirty years later, Protest begins, in some ways, where Qeysar ends: with a man going to prison for a murder he has committed in the name of his family’s honor. The film’s central character, Amir, is sent to prison for murdering his younger brother’s cheating fiancée. At the time of the crime and in prison, he is celebrated as a hero. When he is released from jail several years later, he discovers that society is very different, and he is no longer the hero he once was. Shortly after his release, Amir notes his confusion. “I wasn’t gone for that long,” he says, “but there are new words I don’t understand and the old words don’t mean the same things.” Amir’s confusion attests to the change in public discourse that Mohammad Khatami’s political platform initiated, including the rule of law (hokumat-e qānun). Elsewhere in the film the characters debate reformist policy. So it is clear that what is unique about this period is Khatami’s presidency and the moderate cultural environment that it fostered. Amir cannot function in this new environment and ultimately slips into a life of crime before quietly being murdered in a back alley.

Hamid Dabashi has suggested that Protest represents the “convulsive persistence of what is worst” in Iranian cinema, and he laments Kimiai for “reviving one of…[his] oldest character types, a man jailed for committing a crime to protect his ‘honor’ (nāmus).”⁴ However, the revival of this character type is precisely the point of Protest. If the character of Qeysar embodies the values of the revolution, then Protest importantly asks what happens to those values over time, particularly following Khatami’s election as president. With Protest, Kimiai calls into question the tough-guy genre and asks whether this category of film can occupy a place in Iranian society as the norms of masculinity move away from the violence of revolution and toward Khatami’s civil society. That Kimiai ultimately kills Amir in Protest suggests the inappositeness of the archetypical tough guy in Iran at this time, and that Khatami’s reformist platform rendered the cinematic tough guy irrelevant counters the commonly held belief that the revolution enacted the deepest changes in the course of Iranian cinema.

THE DEATH OF A GENRE

Just as Farmanara’s The Smell of Camphor, the Scent of Jasmine redefined the intellectual in light of Khatami, Kimiai’s Protest rethinks the ideals of masculinity during this period of political reform by resketching the quintessential hero. The significance of Protest depends on both its relationship to Qeysar and its position within the larger trajectory of Iranian popular film in general and the tough-guy genre in particular. The tough-guy genre gained momentum in the 1950s and was part of a larger category called filmfārsi, which included popular films that featured high melodrama, formulaic plots, and a system of stardom. Film critic Amirhushang Kavusi first coined the term filmfārsi in 1953 to describe the popular B-grade films, and the term denotes the belief among film critics at the time that these films were only Iranian insofar as they were in Persian, but their plots and styles were otherwise completely imported from Hollywood and Europe.⁵ The use of other terms, such as film-e ābgushti (stew films), and qualifiers like mobtazal (campy) and monharef  (deviant) to describe these films point to the critical reception of the filmfārsi as a whole. Hamid Naficy remarks that criticism of the filmfārsi genre denoted “underlying anxiety” about the status of film in the country and reflected “a simplistic understanding of Max Horkheimer’s and Theodore Adorno’s ‘pessimistic’ thesis about the work of the culture industry.”⁶ Despite this criticism, filmfārsi films were extraordinarily popular among midcentury audiences.

These popular films have never fully shaken the derogatory language that developed around them at the time of their production, and the scholarship on filmfārsi and its popular predecessors following the revolution has remained surprisingly thin as a result. Iranian film studies often sharply distinguish between art and popular films, especially with regard to films that were released after the revolution. Hamid Naficy, for example, speaks of a “populist cinema” that “inscribes postrevolutionary values” and a “quality cinema” that “engages with those values” and critiques “social conditions under the Islamic government.”⁷ Kamran Rastegar similarly mentions the “distance between art-house auteur cinema and popular cinema in Iran” and suggests that the two branches have responded to the codes of censorship in vastly different ways. Typically, art-house films address international audiences and the flows of the international film festival circuit, whereas the popular films appeal to Iranian audiences in Iran.⁸ This division is at times overstated, and films by directors such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Asghar Farhadi, and Dariush Mehrjui have screened successfully at both the local and international levels. Nevertheless, the way in which the scholarship has divided Iranian cinema, coupled with the classification of popular films as “lowbrow” and the difficulty of accessing films that never made it to international film festivals has meant that much of the literature in the field has overlooked filmfārsi and other popular Iranian films over the past century.

Scholars working on a range of international cinemas have begun to validate popular films by undertaking serious studies of non-Hollywood popular cinemas. Works on Egyptian, Hong Kong, Indian, Japanese, and Nigerian cinemas have all made the case that commercial cinema can offer complex representations of contemporary society that are at times more accessible than representations offered by abstruse art-house films popular abroad.⁹ Walter Armbrust, one of the first scholars to make a case for the study of international commercial cinemas, warns that in Egypt art-house films have been arbitrarily and uncritically identified as “good,” whereas critics and scholars often dismiss commercial films as “bad.” However, studying only “good” films means studying only a small segment in a particular film industry. Armbrust argues that both filmmakers and audiences draw on a “fund of images” derived from both art-house and popular films. Armbrust suggests that the main difference between commercial and art-house cinema rests in technique rather than content, and especially not ideology. He claims that both kinds of films attend to the same social and cultural concerns and derive from the same “patterned narratives.”¹⁰ The study of any national cinema must, therefore, acknowledge, engage, and even overcome the division between popular and art-house cinema that often marks the study of world cinema.

Studies on Iranian cinema have only recently accounted for popular cinema. William Brown’s study of Tahmineh Milani’s Ātashbas (Ceasefire, 2006), for example, suggests that the value of commercial films can be found in their representation of the middle class, a segment of society that has been overlooked by auteur filmmakers, who favor stories of the downtrodden. He advocates for the study of popular films like Ceasefire because they offer “Western audiences” a “glimpse” of Iran otherwise absent from the art-house films that normally make the rounds at the international film festival circuits. Although Brown misguidedly describes the “glimpse” of Iran that emerges in Ceasefire as a “multicultural utopia,” his study nevertheless encourages scholarship that contemplates how popular films reflect the values and norms of that society and in turn provide a more robust picture of a particular national cinema. However, Brown’s methodology, in which he examines one financially successful comedy about a middle-class family and extrapolates that Iranian audiences must favor films with “an ostensible emphasis on wealth, freedom of movement, and indeed a light-hearted tone,” fails to engage the long history of popular film in Iran at the same time that it neglects the complex social and cultural negotiations that mark any given period.¹¹

Naficy’s recent four-volume industrial history, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, rises above the shortcomings of Brown’s study by adding important nuance to the scholarly portrait of Iranian cinema, which, he argues, comprises multiple histories with a variety of genres and funding sources. Popular film plays an important role in this schema, and Naficy writes filmfārsi into the larger history of the Iranian film industry. Accordingly, filmfārsi marked a significant shift as Iranian cinema transformed from an artisanal mode to an industrialized hybrid production model.¹² Commercial cinema was part and parcel of the industrialization of film, because filmfārsi demanded studios and labs with specialized professionals and gave rise to processes for distribution and circulation, which in turn created movie genres. Governmental institutions charged with regulating film, examples of what Naficy calls “ideological apparatuses,” also emerged at this time. The filmfārsi enterprise witnessed the birth of the star system, and the growing numbers of professionals associated with cinema in Iran gave way to the establishment of unions.¹³ In short, the financial, governmental, and technological structures typical of a film industry developed alongside commercial film in Iran.

These developments in the film industry coincided with profound changes in society, including population growth, urbanization, and urban migration. Filmfārsi came into its own during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, who ruled Iran between 1941 and 1979 and enacted one of the most aggressive social reform plans in the country’s history.¹⁴ Commercial films from this era inevitably represent and simultaneously grapple with the corollaries of these social changes. One can see that popular film since its inception has served as a gauge for transformations within both the film industry and society as a whole. Naficy capitalizes on this feature of commercial cinema and draws on the tough-guy genre to investigate the “complex and contingent social and cinematic dynamics” that have determined popular films in Iran. He engages in a kind of “cultural study of genre” and argues that attention to a particular genre reveals a dialectical relationship in which “social and ideological forces are inscribed in a specific group of films” at the same time that “genres influence social and ideological discourses and relations.” Accordingly, the evolution of the tough-guy genre has less to do with “cinematic realism” and more to do with the creation of a “sociocultural encyclopedia” that charts “Iranian cultural orientation, expectations, conventions, and social and ideological formations.”¹⁵

The encyclopedia written by this genre invariably begins with an entry on the figure of the luti, the foundation for most Iranian tough-guy films. The word luti dates back to the tenth century in Persian, and references to the word can be found in classical poetry, including Rumi’s Masnavi-ye m‘anavi (ca. 1258–1273) and works by Naser Khosrow (d. 1088). The term traditionally described any sort of rogue figure, including dervishes. However, during the Qajar Dynasty (1785–1925) the word’s various meanings consolidated and came to represent a specific kind of man, a Robin Hood figure who operated on the fringes of society, sometimes outside of the law but always under a rigid moral and chivalrous code, called javāmardi or lutigari. Because lutis often frequented zurkhānehs, or traditional Iranian gyms, their particular brand of masculinity included physical prowess, and the performance of violence often marked their public disputes. Although lutis operated under a strict moral code, their particular ideological and political leanings were far more nebulous. As a result, religious and bureaucratic leaders often leveraged lutis in order to enact to their own agendas. In this way, without being especially political themselves, lutis have nevertheless historically played a political role in Iranian society, and their shifting political allegiances, together with their code of masculinity, help us determine how tough-guy films in Iran understood the country’s changing social and political dynamics.

Naficy divides the history of the tough-guy genre in Iran into three phases: dāsh mashti films, jāheli films, and Islamicate tough-guy films.¹⁶ Although these phases briefly overlap, each is tied to a particular period of time and offers a unique treatment of the luti figure. Dāsh mashti films, popular between 1950 and 1970, provide a nostalgic look back to the early twentieth century. These films long for the fading traditions of old Iran, and in particular they mourn the loss of the premodern, preurban luti, whose morality and chivalry marked the ideals of masculinity before Iran’s encounter with European modernity corrupted society and traditional values.¹⁷ This wistful look back in time contrasts sharply with jāheli films, which gained popularity between 1965 and 1979. The jāheli subgenre deals directly with the urbanization of the mid-twentieth century and asks what happens to traditional values in post–World War II society. Whereas dāsh mashti films operate as conventional stories of good and evil wherein the generous luti is good and his enemy, the lāt (lout), is evil, in jāheli films we witness the collapse of the luti into the lāt, and the distinction between good and evil becomes much less clear. As a result, the “hopeful and lightweight” outlook of the dāsh mashti films fades to “bitter and pessimistic” themes in jāheli films.¹⁸

The success of the revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic meant the reevaluation of all films and film genres. Parallel to the gradual formation of an Islamized cinema, the tough-guy genre underwent several iterations, including a simple revival of Pahlavi-era tough guys with only slight modifications, a vilification of Pahlavi-era lutis, and finally the creation of an Islamicate tough guy. Onscreen tough guys following the revolution find themselves at the service of the Islamic community, and the moral compass guiding the luti is now decidedly Islamic. The plots of many of these new tough-guy films revolve around the reformation of luti characters to match the new Islamic ideals promoted by the Islamic Republic.¹⁹ The various agencies overseeing cinema within the new government were charged with the very difficult task of taming the Pahlavi-era luti character, who many scholars and critics have identified as revolutionary because of his willingness to die for his beliefs. This negotiation reflected larger discussions among intellectuals and policy makers at this time about how to redirect the fervor of the revolution toward productively establishing and maintaining a new system of governance.

Naficy sees the endurance of the tough-guy trope as evidence of the dynamic and resilient nature of genres. He contends that “genres, particularly those with heavy cultural and ideological investments, do not die; they just evolve.”²⁰ Whereas scholars often assume that political ruptures, like revolutions, also necessitate ruptures in the cultural sphere, Naficy rightly identifies this moment of cinematic continuity before and after the revolution, and his statement on generic immortality raises important questions about the nature of genres themselves. What causes genres to evolve? At what point does one genre give way to another? And, perhaps most importantly for a study of Protest, what happens when a filmmaker tries kill off a genre? Eventually genres outlast their utility, and locating their final moment tells us about both the genres and the societies they claim to represent. Early tough-guy films like Qeysar, with their roots in the historical figure of the luti, speak to shifting ideals of masculinity and society’s anxiety about changing gender roles. So when Masud Kimiai announces the death of the tough-guy luti with Protest, what does it tell us about the anxiety surrounding masculinity at that particular moment? I argue that Protest’s deep investment in Khatami instructs us that reform resolved something in the Iranian collective consciousness regarding masculinity that the revolution could not.

In order to appreciate what the death of the tough-guy genre means in Protest, one must first consider what gave rise to and drove the genre in the first place. The history of the tough-guy genre and Naficy’s rigorous study of its development unravel the practice of periodization in Iran’s film history. In order to delineate the various features of the dāsh mashti and jāheli subgenres, Naficy draws on two of Kimiai’s films—Dāsh Ākol (Dash Akol, 1972), as a representative of the dāsh mashti mode, and Qeysar, as the quintessential jāheli film—and his selection of evidence powerfully defies linearity. Although dāsh mashti films generally preceded jāheli films, these categories do not necessarily break down neatly according to chronology, and ultimately the nebulousness of the tough-guy genre opens up the possibility of thinking of these two subgenres not as ruptures but rather as points of continuity. If these two modes represent varying aesthetic responses to a single set of social concerns, then we can examine the underlying anxieties to which this genre as a whole responds, rather than focusing on the slight changes in society that might have prompted shifts in style.

The tough-guy genre, both the dāsh mashti and jāheli modes, grew out of society’s engagement with modernity. As historians have carefully documented, Westernization, urbanization, new technologies, and other changes attributed to Iranian modernity restructured society and refashioned gender norms and sexual mores.²¹ The experience of modernity for the lower-class Iranian man was particularly emasculating, as family restructuring, new economic systems, and urban migration unsettled the established role of men in society, especially in lower-class families. The working-class man in the second half of the twentieth century struggled both to find his place in the city and to locate the power he once possessed within the family and the community. The tough-guy genre created a space for people affected by these changes to participate in a valorized masculinity, and the dāsh mashti and jāheli subgenres each facilitated this participation in a unique way. Whereas dāsh mashti films like Dash Akol allow viewers to ponder premodern ideals of masculinity, jāheli films reflect on changes to contemporary society and reimagine what a strong and powerful man might look like in light of these changes. Qeysar, as a jāheli film, thereby captures the shifting notions of gender and sexuality and reacts to them with unchecked violence.

POSTCARD SHOTS AND THE INEVITABLE VIOLENCE OF QEYSAR

One of the most relentless criticisms launched against Qeysar is the film’s “touristic” view of Iran, with claims that the representation of traditional places borders on ethnographic. The wide angles and long shots of people performing rituals in spaces like bathhouses and pilgrimage sites have struck critics as foreign and instructive. Film critic Hajir Dariush accused Kimiai of planting “a foreign camera inside an Iranian décor,”²² and filmmaker and author Ebrahim Golestan refers to Qeysar as constituting an imperialistic text.²³ This line of criticism echoes the concerns that filmmakers and critics have launched against Hollywood representations of certain major cities. For example, director Sidney Lumet, discussing films set in New York City, claims that a director “from California” picks “all of the postcard shots,” like the Empire State Building, and in the process misses the actual experience of the city. In a similar vein, Thierry Joussee lambasts Hollywood for turning Paris into a “village for tourists.” At the heart of these critiques rests the question of authority.²⁴ Who has the right to represent a city, and what does it look like when someone without that authority renders a particular city visible?

Yet in the case of Qeysar, much of the film’s legitimacy hinged on the fact that its director grew up in the same south Tehran neighborhoods that he depicts. Indeed, critics often compare Qeysar to Golestan’s film Khesht va āyeneh (Mudbrick and Mirror, 1965) and claim that the characters in Qeysar are more realistic because Kimiai—unlike Golestan, who is an intellectual looking in on the lower class—provides an insider’s account of the social dynamics of that class.²⁵ Ultimately, the claims that Qeysar provides a “touristic” glimpse into Iran present a challenge, because Kimiai did not necessarily gear the film toward international audiences. It found success at film festivals, but only at Iranian festivals. Although the film community in Iran expected the film to fare well at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was never even screened there.²⁶ Qeysar, then, is a commercial film with no visible international audience, but it represents Iran as a strange and foreign land.

This act of defamiliarization captures the immense social changes of this period and the estrangement from Iran felt by many working-class Iranians. Issues of gender and sexuality act as a barometer with which we might evaluate social change, and in Qeysar shifting gender roles and new sexual mores underscore the lower-class man’s new, evolving position in urban Iran. These issues highlight his powerlessness and his anxiety, and together with ethnographic images of Iran’s most traditional spaces, they capture a society in transition, one whose most important cultural sites and rituals now require documentation. In this way, Qeysar transforms its local Iranian audience into group of tourists. However, the film does more than just capture the isolation of modernity; it also prescribes a way out of this personal turmoil through its absolution of unchecked violence, which ultimately becomes the fervor of the revolution.

In order to appreciate the film’s masculinity, one must take into consideration its depiction of female characters. The female café dancer is a hallmark and nonnegotiable feature of the filmfārsi franchise, including Qeysar, and her depiction mirrors the evolution of gender roles on film. The first Persian-language talkie film, Dokhtar-e Lor (The Lor girl, 1933), although not technically a filmfārsi film, set many of the standards of the filmfārsi mode, including the café dance scene. In this film, a group of bandits capture the titular character, Golnar, and as the film opens, she is forced to perform. This scene features closeup shots of her dancing body, which betray the viewer’s intended male subjectivity. Meanwhile, the male audience in the scene forms a tight circle around Golnar as she dances, and these shots, which are almost claustrophobic, serve as a reminder of her captivity. The actress who played Golnar, Ruhangiz Saminezhad, did not even realize that she was acting in a film; the directors tricked her into thinking that she was just playing with a toy, and she later encountered severe criticism for her role and ultimately had to change her name to avoid the negative attention she received.²⁷ The character and the actress both unwillingly fell into this objectified role, and this early example of a café dancer demonstrates the lack of agency of women in Iranian cinema in the early twentieth century.

At first glance, the café dance scene in Qeysar appears similar to Golnar’s performance in The Lor Girl. Although Soheila, the resident dancer and singer in Qeysar, wears a much more revealing outfit, the same closeup shots of her moving body guide the viewer’s experience of the show. However, the way that Soheila interacts with the audience signals the changes in gender roles that have transpired since The Lor Girl was released almost four decades earlier. Soheila performs on a stage, removed from the male audience, whose members she effectively renders immobile. Several medium shots, spliced in as reverse shots to her dancing body, reveal groups of men silent and unmoving (figure 4.1). In short, she commands the room, and she even gleefully teases the male band members and the waiter who passes by during her performance. In a similar vein, the actress who played Soheila, known by her stage name Shahrzad, was a star who, at the time, was in a public relationship with Behruz Vosuqi, the actor who played Qeysar. So although the camera stills sexualized the female body, the control that women had over the filmic audience and their forceful presence as stars in the film industry demonstrate the extent to which gender dynamics had changed over a relatively short period of time.

FIGURE 4.1. A shot intended to entice the heterosexual, male viewer. Frame enlargement from Masud Kimiai’s Qeysar.

The effect that these changes had on masculinity becomes apparent in the interactions between Qeysar and Soheila. He seeks out Soheila to get information about the whereabouts of the last Ab-Mangol brother, Mansur. When she approaches him after her performance, a carefully staged scene exposes his meekness in front of a strong female character. As Soheila stands by the table at which he sits, we see her from Qeysar’s perspective, and she towers over him, consuming most of the frame. As he stammers to speak to her, she very forcefully says, “Speak faster, I have things to do.” As their encounter continues, Soheila initiates each step. She suggests they leave the café and then tells him to stay the night with her. Once they are in her apartment, she removes her clothes in front of him and then forces him to unhook her underwear. During all of this, Qeysar sits uncomfortably in her small bed, unsure of what to do or where to look. As she stands naked in front of him, she asks what is he thinking about, and he replies, “I am thinking about tomorrow.” The bedroom scene ends abruptly: a train loudly flies across the screen, and we realize that it is now the following day and Qeysar has arrived at the train station to kill Mansur. In the face of this modern woman, who is in control sexually and financially (as demonstrated by the fact that she has her own apartment), Qeysar has become an emasculated character, unable to even imagine a sexual relationship with her.

Qeysar’s interactions with Soheila diverge considerably from his relationship with the only other main female character, Azam, his former love interest. Everything about Azam stands in contrast to Soheila, from the spaces she occupies (a traditional home with her family) to the clothes she wears (a chador), and in turn Qeysar’s dealings with her are markedly different. When he enters her house, for example, he comfortably settles on the floor in the traditional living room, which has no seating furniture. Here he does not struggle to fit awkwardly on a small piece of European furniture that does not fit his stature. Azam serves him tea as he waits for her father, and although she stands while he sits, we did not see her from his perspective, so she does not tower over the viewer like Soheila does. Later Qeysar watches Azam through a window as she prepares the qaliyān (hookah) for the men, and his attraction to her is evident. In this more traditional scheme, the gender roles are clear: she serves him, and he admires her from afar. As a result, Azam does not prompt the same level of anxiety from Qeysar as Soheila does. The female characters in the film thus demonstrate the changing roles of women in society but at the same time provide an opportunity for the film to reflect on how those changes affect tough guys.

Of course, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reminds us, any study of gender would be incomplete without consideration of sexuality, and in Qeysar anxieties about gender and sexuality converge and redirect the ideals of masculinity toward violence.²⁸ The character of Soheila, in addition to representing the new, modern woman, hints at changing notions of sexuality as well. When she first approaches Qeysar in the café, we see him eating and only hear her voice as she tries to get his attention. She says, “Pst. Pst. Sir? Mister?” Her voice is so deep that the viewer assumes it belongs to a man, and when she finally refers to Qeysar as mamani—a derivative of the word “mom” that means “cutie”—the viewer is struck by the gender at play, as a very masculine voice says a word that usually women use. At this very moment, the viewer finally sees the speaker, Soheila, and realizes that the voice belongs to a woman. It is a confounding experience, because Soheila’s preceding performance demonstrates her sex appeal, but at the same time she is masculine. That she carries herself in a simultaneously masculine yet sexual way reinforces the changing gender roles during this period while also hinting at new orders of sexuality and the subsequent anxieties surrounding these changing orders.

Historians and literary scholars have extensively documented premodern sexual practices in Iran, and they have established that homoerotic relationships between men were an important part of society during the premodern period.²⁹ However, beginning in the nineteenth century, the watchful gaze of European imperialist forces shamed Iranian society into consolidating its diverse sexual practices, and only heterosexual relations were normalized. As Afsaneh Najmabadi has shown, although the official rhetoric regarding homosexuality changed rather suddenly, Iranian society and culture grappled with this new order more gradually.³⁰ By the time we arrive at the mid-twentieth century and Qeysar, art is continuing to negotiate these changes, and one can see remnants of the former systems of homoeroticism. These negotiations were particularly forceful at this time because the encounter with modernity—of which the consolidation of sexuality is an important part—was particularly traumatic during this period, as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s White Revolution policies sought to modernize the country rapidly. In Qeysar these negotiations expose the violence that grew out of anxieties about sexuality during this particular historical moment.

No scene captures the collapse of sexual anxiety and violence more powerfully than the bathhouse murder in Qeysar. One of the most recognizable moments in Iran’s film history, this scene follows Qeysar into a traditional bathhouse, or hamām, as he seeks revenge on the first Ab-Mangol brother, Karim. Golestan criticizes this scene for its “Orientalist” perspective and for its unrealistic representation of the bathhouse, including the lack of steam and the overpowering sound of water during the murder scene.³¹ However, Golestan’s expectation that the scene be realistic overlooks the film’s modernist, surreal mode. Kimiai and the film’s cinematographer, Maziar Partow, often regarded as Iran’s first cinematographer, created an environment in the bathhouse that reflects the anxieties of both Qeysar and a changing society. The scene’s slow pace, with long shots that provide sweeping views of the hamām’s various chambers and rituals, echoes Qeysar’s uncertainty as he struggles to come to terms with the murder he is about to commit. Without steam, the scene seems sterile and educational, a quality that speaks to the film’s intentional construction of an Iran that seems foreign to local audiences in order to convey the rapid social changes.

One absence that Golestan does not mention, but that is perhaps most perplexing of all, is the lack of body hair on the male characters in the bathhouse, and the many close-ups of the actor Behruz Vosuqi’s bare, hairless chest highlight this strange feature of the scene. Certainly, these hairless bodies address changing standards of male beauty, perhaps inspired by European or American ideals. At the same time, the issue of body hair in Iran has also historically been tied to sexuality, and in particular homosexuality. Premodern sexual relations between men often involved an older man and a young boy, and the lack of body hair of young men helped draw the boundaries of this system. Once a man reached sexual maturity, he was no longer a suitable object of sexual desire. In medieval poetry, a boy reached the height of his desirability when he grew a khatt-e sabz, or green line, the first traces of a mustache. After his facial hair filled out, he was no longer sought after in this sexual practice. The hairless adult male bodies in Qeysar confound this traditional way of categorizing both sexual maturity and desire, especially at a time when sexual mores were changing.

Qeysar eventually follows Karim into a shower stall, where they seem to struggle before Qeysar finally kills him with a straight razor. However, during this scene the shower’s running water drowns out all of the other sounds so that we hear only water while watching two naked, hairless bodies embrace, and in fact their first move is a long hug. Without the sounds of their struggle, the various poses of the men’s brawl seem intimate and impassioned. The movement ends with a close-up of Karim’s hand sliding down the shower wall, followed by a shot of Qeysar stepping back, leaning against the shower door, out of breath. Both of these gestures could signal either the end of a fight or the end of a sexual encounter (figures 4.2 and 4.3). It is not until Qeysar sets the razor down and we see blood in the drain that the events that just transpired become clear. That this scene simultaneously captures intimacy and murder suggests the extent to which violence is wrapped up in sexuality.

FIGURE 4.2. Aerial view of the shower fight. Frame enlargement from Qeysar.

FIGURE 4.3. This shot of a hand on the shower tile recalls the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Frame enlargement from Qeysar.

And, indeed, it is the unrelenting and unchecked violence of this scene that connects the film to the fervor that fueled the revolution of 1978–1979. Scholars see this shower scene as a clear citation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the murder of Marion. In Qeysar Karim’s hand on the tiled shower wall recalls Marion’s final moment in Psycho, and this shot reflects Kimiai’s knowledge of international film at this time.³² And yet there is an important difference between these two films’ respective shower scenes that has thus far gone unacknowledged. A series of cinematic cuts in Psycho correspond to Norman’s knife; each new shot cues for the viewer a different stab. As Kaja Silverman has noted, the rapid succession of violent cuts, both physical and cinematic, leaves us with “no choice but [to] identify with Marion in the shower.”³³ In other words, the film’s editing and cinematography force us to empathize with her as a victim. Qeysar, however, resists this kind of identification with the victim, Karim. As the scene begins, we occupy a vantage point far above the shower stall, a distance that does not favor one character over the other. Our perspective then moves to within the shower, amid the fighting bodies, but a steady series of shot–reverse shots refuse to privilege either Karim or Qeysar. And, unlike in Psycho, in which we are forced to look at Marion’s tiny, dead body, in Qeysar we never see Karim’s corpse. After the murder we only see Qeysar’s relief, so if any act of identification occurs, it is with the murderer and not the victim. At the very least, the shower scene in Qeysar does not evoke sympathy for the victim.

The film’s danger rests in the absence of this act of identification. Qeysar is a film that does not condemn its own violence, which, in turn, opens up a space for condoning violence, especially in the name of honor, the nebulous force that drives the character of Qeysar. Throughout the film, the police pursue Qeysar, which establishes tension between the rule of law and vigilante justice. That Kimiai refuses to show Qeysar’s apprehension in the end is a testament to the film’s ambivalence about operating outside of the law, when such actions are in the name of a higher moral code not covered by the modern legal system. This ambivalence ultimately led to the government’s decision to ban the film.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had a private screening of the film in his home and initially praised the film, but later the government banned it. This abrupt change in policy presents a puzzle. Why would the shah support a film but later allow it to be banned? Reports of young men in south Tehran violently acting out immediately after seeing the film help us understand the effect that it had on the class it represented, and these reactions are often cited as the reason for the film’s ban from theaters.³⁴ However, this is only part of the full picture. That the film inspired violence was not nearly as dangerous as the fact that the film was being received as a call to violence and that it defied and even confronted the police presence on which the Pahlavi regime depended in order to maintain its power. The government’s ambivalence and, ultimately, its rejection of the film make more sense when one considers the critical work on Kimiai’s film that was published shortly after the revolution. These essays, time and time again, liken the film to a rallying cry for the revolution,³⁵ in the same way that literary scholars and historians look to the works of Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati as indicators of the fervor that would fuel the revolution. Qeysar captured the frustrations of a generation of men caught in the throes of tremendous social change, which left them with very little social, economic, and political power. But the film did more than simply represent an increasingly disenfranchised group; it also offered a way out through violence and the reinstatement of traditional values, a rhetoric that would emerge more fully ten years later, during the revolution.

THE HERO REDEFINED

Released thirty years after Qeysar, Protest begins with the same celebration of violence. The film opens with Amir confronting Reza’s fiancée. Amir explains that he found her lover’s house easily, and he scolds her for not cutting off relations with him. He reminds her that he warned her the last time he discovered her infidelity that he would kill her the next time. He repeatedly tells her that she will not see her lover, Ahmad, again, and he insists that she not speak. Initially, we only hear Amir’s voice laid over a black screen, and when an image does appear, the camera focuses squarely on Amir, so that the viewer cannot see his addressee. Finally, the camera shuffles to the right and reveals the silhouette of a woman, but even in the closeup shots of her, the light coming from the window behind her prevents us from seeing her face. As Amir grows angrier, he hits a table, and the woman’s hand awkwardly falls to the side. He bitingly asks, “Who named you Sharifeh?”—a question that plays with the meaning of her name, which translates as “noble.” In the next shot, Amir picks up the phone and calls Reza. As he explains about Sharifeh’s infidelity, the camera pans back to Sharifeh and settles on the floor, where a pool of blood gathers under her seat. It is in this moment that we recognize what we already knew: that Amir had already killed Sharifeh and has been speaking to her corpse the entire time.

This scene gives way to a montage that shows Amir aging behind bars, and unlike in Qeysar, in which we never see the main character held accountable to the law, in Protest Amir suffers the legal repercussions of his actions. However, in the opening scenes of Protest, the rule of law still does not win over personal moral codes. When Amir is released twelve years later, a fellow prisoner delivers a speech in his honor. He lauds Amir’s crime and describes it in terms of nāmus, or honor. He reminds Amir and the other prisoners that God is the true judge of crimes and implies that God would not deem Amir’s murder a crime. The prisoner says, “Today a man will be set free,” and his stress on the word “man” emphasizes Amir’s manliness and links his honorable crime to his sense of masculinity. As Amir leaves the prison, the other prisoners cheer for him and donate money to his life as a free man. At the time of the murder and in prison, he is considered a hero for the crime he has committed, and he encapsulates the revolutionary violence that we also see in Qeysar.

The opening two scenes of Protest recall Qeysar in a number of ways. Family honor and female chastity drive the murder in Protest just as they fuel the violence in Qeysar. In both films, the characters recognize that they are operating outside of the law but believe that their moral code is more important than the rule of law. When Amir calls Reza to tell him what he has done, he says, “If I hadn’t done it, you would have.” This sentence directly recalls Qeysar, when Farman claims, “If I don’t do it [go after Mansour Ab-Mangol], then Qeysar will slaughter the entire bazar.” In both instances, the elder brother believes that the younger shares the same commitment to protecting the family’s honor. Of course, in Qeysar Farman’s prophecy comes true, and Qeysar goes on a murdering spree. However, in Protest, Reza, with the benefit of twelve years to think it over, claims that he would not have made the same decision that Amir made. My interest in Protest rests precisely in this claim. Why does this chain of violence, which extends over thirty years from Farman to Qeysar to Amir, come to an end with Reza at this particular moment in 1999? The film destabilizes the place of the traditional luti tough guy through Amir and replaces him with a new hero through the character of Reza. Political reform, although heavily criticized in the film, ultimately opens a space for this new hero to prevail in the end.

As Amir leaves prison, he dons a hat similar to the fedoras popular among lutis of the mid-twentieth century, including Farman in Qeysar. He wears the hat throughout the film and only takes it off in his final moments as he slowly bleeds out. The hat both marks Amir as a traditional tough guy and singles him out; no other character outside of prison wears a hat. Indeed, once Amir leaves prison, he discovers that the traditional tough guy represented by the hat no longer has a place in society, and we see Amir struggle to find space in two different places: the home and the city. After his family picks him up from the prison gate, Amir discovers that they have sold their previous home and currently rent a place that builders are preparing to destroy in order to construct a skyscraper. When he arrives at the house, Amir boldly states that although the rest of the family may be comfortable in the house, he is not. Later we see his large body sprawled on a small couch. He tries to sleep while his mother talks on the phone and the silhouettes of his sister and brother-in-law angrily move behind a glass door. The claustrophobia of this scene overwhelms both Amir and the viewer. In this house he literally has no space, which reflects his standing in the family. Although Amir is the eldest son and should step into the role of the head of the household following his father’s death, his mother announces to him that his brother-in-law Farhad is in charge in this house. The family whose honor Amir defended with his crime not only refuses to valorize him but also denies him a meaningful role in the family structure.

Amir’s lack of space extends beyond the home and into the street, as he fails to secure a place for himself anywhere in the city and, by extension, anywhere in society. Reza likens his brother to a “stranger wandering the streets,” claims that Amir “lives by his own laws,” and finally concludes, “There is no one like him left in Tehran.” This pointed description grounds the scenes we see of Amir interacting with the city. He wanders deserted stockyards, lurks in the shadows, and at one point we see him emerge from a highway tunnel, walking in the middle of the road in broad daylight. Both the desolate street and Amir’s decision to walk in the middle of it would be striking to anyone familiar with traffic in Tehran. This scene has no bearing on the film’s plot. The preceding and subsequent scenes do indicate a point of origin or a destination, and this brief scene ultimately only serves to remind the viewer of the dislocation between Amir, on the one hand, and the city and its rules, on the other. Amir’s physical relationship with Tehran underscores his position in society. Because of his status as a criminal, he never finds honest work and must resort to running errands for a bookie. When Farhad asserts that Amir does not scare him, because “the days of outlaws are long over,” the viewer recognizes that Amir has no social currency and no power. The violent qualities that once demanded respect now preclude him from being a meaningful member of society.

Amir’s struggle to locate a place in society forces him into the underworld of cockfighting, a place where traditional luti ideals still hold true. Cockfighting was historically a popular luti pastime, so it is no coincidence that Amir finds a home within this circle. Protest casts Amir as the inheritor of traditional luti values but also relocates those values underground and represents them as inhumane. The viewer’s first encounter with cockfighting reveals its cruel violence. As crowds of men circle around two roosters and wave money to place their bets, slow-motion shots establish the primitive violence between the two birds. They attack to kill, and the law of the jungle reigns supreme, but it is human intervention that ultimately lends this scene its brutality. During a short time-out, men forcefully push a rag down the cock’s throat to absorb the blood so that he can continue fighting. Slow motion again heightens the inhumanity of this act, and Amir, whose eyes mediate this scene for the viewer, looks away. Despite Amir’s obvious disgust for the fight that unfolds, he nevertheless stays and eventually becomes part of that world.

The underground world that provides Amir with a job and some semblance of a life kills him in the end. One night as he leaves the cockfight, he knows that Ahmad, Sharifeh’s former lover, is following him. Amir pulls Ahmad into a dark alley and, as it begins to rain, tells him to “be a man” and kill him, to seek revenge for the murder that Amir committed against his lover and his unborn child. Ahmad quietly stabs Amir and runs away as Amir slowly bleeds out in the rain. Whereas at the beginning of the film Amir proudly claims that he would kill Sharifeh again if he had the chance, near the end of the film he declares that “the shame of the murder I committed chokes me more and more every day.” Amir’s values do not necessarily change throughout the course of the film. After all, he uses the same rhetoric of revenge to incite Ahmad to murder him. Although he does not undergo any sort of teleological change, Amir does recognize that his values no longer have a place in society. His quiet death hails the death of those traditional tough-guy values at the same time that it marks the end of the cycles of celebrated violence that determined the Islamic Republic during its early history.

As Amir bleeds out, the scene fades and returns to the pizza shop, where Reza sulks. He has just inadvertently delivered pizza to a wedding party for the woman he loves, Ladan. Although she returns his love, he refuses to marry her because Amir’s release from jail unsettles him and makes him aware of his own disadvantaged background. As Reza’s friends try to console him, Ladan suddenly appears in the rain in her wedding dress. A meaningful glance between Reza and Ladan confirms that she has left her groom to be with him, and a frozen frame of a closeup shot of Ladan smiling at Reza closes the film. By the standards of popular Iranian cinema, getting the girl identifies a film’s hero, and in this case, Reza clearly emerges victorious. So in the same moment and under the same rain in which the tough guy, who previously represented the ideals of masculinity, bleeds to death, a very new kind of heroic masculinity is born.

Reza’s character fixes the terms of this new, idealized masculinity. He is thoughtful, intellectual, sensitive, and—above all—rational. Although underemployed as a pizza delivery boy, he has a master’s degree and spends most of the film discussing politics and philosophy with his friends. During all of these conversations, he demands their respect with his ideas and talks more than any of the other characters. At one point in the film, he gently helps his friend overcome an addiction to opium, and later he carefully tends to Ladan after she is attacked during a protest. His condemnation of violence, though, contrasts most sharply with the tough-guy masculinity of yesterday. During a conversation with Amir, he explains, “If I had known Sharifeh was still involved with Ahmad, I would have acted differently. I would have satisfied my conscience, as you say, without ruining other people’s lives as well. Keeping your dignity is good, but ruining another person’s life is taking it too far.” He balances a sense of honor with pacifism, and he takes it a step further when he declares, “Sharifeh’s child could have been a good citizen of this country.” This description of the unborn child, which Amir refers to as a “sin within a sin,” attests to Reza’s logic and to his optimism. He not only forgives Sharifeh but also sees hope in her mistakes. Reza’s kind, rational masculinity looks beyond the dynamics of family honor and seeks what is best for society as a whole.

The violent masculinity venerated by characters like Qeysar and Amir responds to the emasculating experience of modernity, and one must wonder what kind of rupture gives rise to the gentle, logical masculinity embodied in the character of Reza. Protest clearly positions itself in a moment of profound social change. From Amir’s observation about the new public discourse to Reza’s insistence that “the days of such reactions [i.e., honor killings] have passed,” Protest suggests that Iranian society has undergone significant transformation in the twelve years since Amir went to prison. Amir finds these changes so disorienting that he declares, “I am sick of this freedom,” a play on not only Reza’s repeated claim that society is free now but also Amir’s new status as a free man. He continues, “Such reactions might have no place in your lives anymore, but I won’t just bow to the change of time.” His desire to die at the end of the film confirms the fact that these changes are not fleeting but rather constitute a rupture in traditional social values.

In Protest, these changes bounce in the wave of political reform that had swept the country at the turn of the century. Many of the references to reform and social change occur in dialogue, but the film also uses music to establish reform as the impetus for this new kind of masculinity. Reform and the reformists serve as the main talking points during discussions among the young students in the pizza shop, and reformist newspapers like Khordād and Neshāt cover the table. Similarly, during Amir and Reza’s heated discussion, Reza says, “I am talking about today’s sense of reason in society…a progressive society.” His choice of words here clearly references “civil society,” one of Khatami’s most important political platforms. During this same conversation, as a piano player sings pop music in the background, Amir explodes, “Is that guy singing or whining?” Reza shakes his head disapprovingly, and the shot switches to a close-up of the piano player, whose presence is also very much wrapped up in the cultural environment fostered by Khatami and the reformists. Before Khatami’s presidency, this kind of live pop music would not have been allowed in a restaurant.³⁶ This song, along with Amir’s reaction to it, suggests a small change in society at the same time that it points to the political atmosphere that engendered the change. Throughout the film, references to how much society has changed are often punctuated with references to Khatami. So reform is clearly the rupture that puts an end to the old, violent masculinity and clears way for a new, rational masculinity.

Like Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Under the Skin of the City, Protest criticizes reform at the same time that it performs it. Although pulled from theaters after only one week, the film was wildly popular because of its direct political commentary, and this commentary would not have made it through Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance had it not been for Khatami’s presidency. Toward the end, the film becomes particularly pointed in its critique of Khatami and the reformist movement. Reza says:

Philosophy can’t run the country. You need power, law, and freedom together. One side has the law while the other side has the power…. I, for one, haven’t read a convincing definition of civil society…. Khatami once said, “I am everyone’s president.” We’re all part of the nation, which is a liberal stand. But who will implement it? Those who have the power do not agree with Khatami.

In a rather concise manner, Reza echoes the major criticisms launched against Khatami at this time, even among his staunchest supporters. These criticisms included Khatami’s unwillingness to pin down certain philosophical terms, like “civil society,” and his inaction and inability to enact many of the changes he promised during his campaign. As Reza speaks, he suddenly breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audience, implicating the viewer in everything he says. As a result, when one of the characters says, “This isn’t politics; it’s everyday talk,” the viewer understands and has even experienced cinematically the all-encompassing experience of Khatami’s presidency, which helps explain why, as various characters insist that society has changed, it is easy to understand reform as the impetus for this change.

Protest dramatizes the tension between revolution and reform by casting them as two brothers. When Kimiai kills Amir, he essentially kills Qeysar and with him the entire tough-guy genre. During the period of reform, space was made for a new kind of masculinity, and as a result, the tough-guy genre, just like Amir, no longer had a place in society. Although the revolution of 1978–1979 altered the tough-guy genre by Islamizing it, the real structural change to the genre (i.e., its demise) came during Khatami’s presidency, because the moderate political and cultural environment he fostered refigured what it meant to be a man, and it eliminated the need for and desire to have an idealized, violent tough guy. This pattern is visible throughout the history of Iranian cinema. The establishment of the Islamic Republic enacted a number of surface changes to cinema, especially through censorship, but discussions of reform actually created some of the most profound changes to the industry.

MOHAMMAD KHATAMI: PRESIDENT, INVISIBLE MOVIE STAR

Protest marks Khatami’s entrance into popular cinema and proves that it was not just art-house filmmakers invested in his philosophical contributions who sought to situate his presidency in a larger system of cinematic representation. Abulhosssein Davudi’s Nān o ‘eshq o mutur-e hezar (Bread, love, and a 1000cc motorcycle, 2001) powerfully attests to Khatami’s larger place in popular cinema and uses the tropes of the filmfārsi franchise in order to criticize factionalist politics during Khatami’s presidency at the same time that it undercuts its own heritage as a filmfārsi film. In other words, Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle functions simultaneously as parody and satire, poking fun of its own form in order to make a larger social critique. The film stages political factionalism by way of dramatic haircuts: members of the basij cut the hair of those people they believe to be reformists, to whom they refer as mozdur-e estekbār, or “hired by the arrogant” (i.e., the United States). They ironically start with the local hairdresser and then speed off on their newly converted 1000cc motorcycle. Of course, these bad haircuts do not even approach the actual violence that occurred between conservative basijis and reformists during this period, and these hair attacks may even refer to the infamous serial murders of reformists during Khatami’s presidency.

The political narrative in Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle plays out against a melodramatic love story typical of filmfārsi, as orphaned Baran must find a suitable husband in three days or her guardian uncle will give away her inheritance. In the midst of an exaggerated courtship, Baran watches a scene from James Cameron’s Titanic (1997); as Rose says her final goodbye to Jack, and her emotional reaction to this scene reminds the viewer that melodramas construct romance to elicit a response. Throughout the film, Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle overperforms and overdetermines its own filmfārsi-ness, with over-the-top characters and storylines, and this tactic makes its political reality slippery for the viewer and perhaps also for the censors. Indeed, the opening moments of the film obscure the line between reality and fiction (and filmfārsi melodrama, at that). As the title flies onto the screen, a voiceover reminds us, “This is a true story. A story that is very similar to a film. Although there are a number of unemployed bums who believe that this tale is a lie, you should believe that everything you see and hear is exactly the truth.” Locating the very serious political message among the heightened and often hilarious melodrama proves challenging. Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle unabashedly makes fun of everything—from intellectualism to politics to filmfārsi itself—with little discernment.

There is no doubt that Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle deals directly with filmfārsi. The title screen and voiceover warning give way to a scene showing the famous actor Fardin in his role of Ali in Ganj-e Qarun (Qarun’s treasure, 1965), a quintessential filmfārsi film. And much of the film’s humor depends on the viewer’s knowledge of filmfārsi conventions; the exaggerations only make sense if one understands what the film exaggerates. As is typical of filmfārsi, Bread, Love, and a 1000cc Motorcycle neatly ties up its loose ends, and the film ends with a brief report on what each of the characters has been up to, and this report is accompanied by stills of photographs, a common technique that lets the viewer know that the future of these characters has been determined. Just when the film should be over, a coda appears, and the voiceover announces that two of the characters, one a reformist and the other a basiji, never make it to the wedding because something “interesting” happened to them. We see them stranded in a desert, when suddenly a motorcade drives by and pulls over to offer them a ride. When Arashak, the reformist, opens the door, we see his surprise, and he says, “Mr. Khatami.” His basiji companion, Dariush, at first refuses to get into the car but is ultimately persuaded to get in, and the scene comes to a close as the two men pile into Khatami’s car and the narrator says, “And this is another story altogether.” The political message here is explicit: these two competing groups need to come together and move forward with Khatami.

However, this coda also raises an important question about reform and popular film. Why would a film so invested in its own status as a filmfārsi unravel its neat ending to include this scene with an invisible Khatami as its star? Ultimately, such a scene positions Khatami and reform—as much as melodrama and happy endings—as inseparable parts of popular cinema. Khatami’s presence in popular film at this time was inevitable. Khatami’s early engagement with film, during his tenure as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, revealed the fact that his reformist ideas constituted part of a much larger philosophical and intellectual movement taking place in Iran in the early 1990s. His greatest achievement as president was to bring these abstract concepts to a popular audience, where they became “everyday talk.” It is only natural, then, that Khatami as a character and his reformist policies did not remain stagnant in art-house cinema but also made their way to popular cinema.