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LEGACY | Dariush Mehrjui: The slain pioneer

Nov 01, 2023 03:34 PM IST

The murdered Iranian director inspired a generation of filmmakers and taught us that all cinema is political

The birth of the Iranian New Wave cinema movement in the late 1960s was no accident. At the thick of the White Revolution, when modernisation reforms introduced by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi — the last Shah of Iran who was overthrown in 1979 — upended the wealth and influence of Iran’s land-owning class and led to rapid urbanisation, many of Iran’s intellectuals returned to the country of their birth with Western education and ideas. One such mind was journalist, screenwriter and director Dariush Mehrjui.

Dariush Mehrjui was found murdered at the age of 83. PREMIUM
Dariush Mehrjui was found murdered at the age of 83.

A fortnight ago, on October 14, he was found stabbed to death along with his wife Vahideh Mohammadifar, also a screenwriter, in their residence in Karaj, Iran. He was 83.

Iranian cinema before the 1960s, much like Indian cinema of that period, borrowed heavily from mythology. Their language was unequivocal melodrama. When, in 1965, Mehrjui returned after dropping out of a film school in California and completing a degree in philosophy from UCLA, the time was opportune for a new idiom—not just in cinema, but in literature and performance arts. Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) is considered the first Iranian New Wave film, inspired by the works of neo-realist filmmakers who were already changing cinema languages around Europe and Asia, like Vittorio Di Sica, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray and others.

Mehrjui’s teacher was Jean Renoir. He, along with other filmmakers such as Hajir Darioush, Masoud Kimiai, Nasser Taghvai and Ebrahim Golestan were interested in using the medium to explore the dynamics of class and gender identities in Iran. Their characters were manual labourers and village folks, and the high-pitched melodrama gave way to sparse, quieter treatments with open-ended climaxes.

An entire canon of filmmaking was born, Mehrjui, also a journalist, editor and writer, was its father. It’s a genre that has travelled widely across the world and is appreciated mostly outside of Iran given its oppressive censorship regimes. Mehrjui, like the genre he helped birth, wasn’t a politically overt voice against the Iranian establishment throughout his life, but in 2022, he openly challenged officials of the Islamic Republic to kill him for his opposition to censorship. The cause of his death, and that of his wife’s, however, is not conclusive yet.

Mehrjui’s first film, Diamond 33 (1967), was a parody of the James Bond films—a professor cracks a formula to make diamonds from oil, he is killed in Tehran, and his nephew who is a spy, is sent to Tehran by Interpol to find the formula. The Cow (1969) was the emergence of a startling new voice. It is about Hassan, a rural man who loses his cow and descends into madness. The Cycle (1975) looked unflinchingly at Iran’s medical system and its victims. His first box office success was with The Tenants (1987), a comedy set in a housing society in Tehran.

After the revolution, Mehrjui chose to portray Tehran’s upper class—the class to which he belonged, which concerned itself more with art, money and opinions rather than common life. The most important film of this phase is Hamoun (1989), about a middle-aged intellectual who experiences a mental breakdown as his marriage unravels.

In the months leading up to the 1979 revolution, Mehrjui filmed the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shia cleric who went on to lead what became the Islamic Republic of Iran. Khomeini was then in exile in France and proved to be a valuable ally once he came into power.

But throughout the 1990s, Mehrjui depicted the lives of women, and the best film of that period, Leila (1997), is a searing portrait of an urban woman who convinces her husband to marry a second time because she can’t have children—a slow, sparse film full of pain that brings out hypocrisies inherent among Tehran’s middle-class.

In interviews, Mehrjui said that Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni greatly influenced his cinema. Like his gurus, Mehrjui’s works never promoted a particular ideology or political party. Filmmakers such as Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and several others have received accolades from the rest of the world, but have faced persecution at home. But more than 60 years of Iranian cinema tell us that everything is political.

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