Once in a while, you are treated to a film that leaves your senses reeling, that you will savour for years after.
Dragon Arrives
Once in a while, you are treated to a film that leaves your senses reeling, that you will savour for years after. Iranian director Mani Haghighi’s A Dragon Arrives! (Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad!) is one such. For me, it was the equivalent of that adrenaline shot stabbed into Uma Thurman’s heart in Pulp Fiction. I saw it in the Berlin Film Festival Competition earlier this year, and skipped two movies after, so that I could linger with its images and relish its aftertaste. It’s been a grey, rainy week, so I cheered myself up by recalling a recent film that made my heart soar.
A still from A Dragon Arrives!
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This is a kickass Iranian Western that is so sexy, I could die. No mishti kids here in moral fables, returning schoolbooks or sharing shoes. A Dragon Arrives! produced and directed by Mani Haghighi, has three very hot guys in black suits, hats and shades, cruising in a bright orange Impala in the desert. The trio comprises a detective and his two colleagues, investigating the case of a political prisoner, who has hanged himself in an abandoned ship in the middle of a desert. The walls of the ship are covered with his diary entries in Persian calligraphy. A complex film, it is part thriller, part folk tale, part mockumentary, and loaded with political metaphors. And it is set in the extraordinary landscape of the desert island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf.
Detective Babak Hafizi (Amir Jadidi) was kidnapped in 1964 by his own agency, the secret service he works for, and is interrogated by his boss Major Jahangiri, about what actually happened in Qeshm. Later, it seems, they are counterspies who have infiltrated the agency, a reference to the Shah’s SAVAK secret police. The story is told by a series of unreliable narrators. It seems that the dead prisoner has been murdered, and that Qeshm’s cemetery has earthquakes every time a body is buried. Hafizi teams up with a sound engineer Keyvan (Ehsan Goudarzi) and geologist Behnam (Homayoun Ghanizadeh), to investigate. This is a severely chic Iran: the hippie sound engineer Keyvan is a très cool, effeminate man, with exquisite good taste in floral, fur-lined jackets (rather post-’64), who feeds an abandoned infant with a white balloon teat on a milk bottle.
The film offers many sub-plots: there’s even a Hitchcock moment, as Haghighi appears onscreen, discussing The Brick and the Mirror, a film his grandfather Ebrahim Golestan directed in 1964. Another sub-plot involves the missing daughter of an ophthalmologist and former shark-hunter (what a career-switch!). There’s even a small sequence with Indian migrants in turbans.
Cinematographer Houman Behmanesh is stylish, and imbues the film with saturated colours, and Christophe Rezai’s techno-trance soundtrack hypnotically combines traditional trance music with Western rhythms. Rather than worrying about making sense of the plots, metaphors and political references, just abandon yourself to this intoxicating, sensory film, with a fascinating yarn, astounding images, incredibly good music and breathtaking desertscapes.
Haghighi describes himself as a surrealist; the viewer decides the meaning of his work. The director, who had earlier made Modest Reception and Men at Work, and also acted in the former and Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly, takes a quantum leap with this film. It knocks the bottom out of whatever you expect from Iranian cinema. I hope we can see it at a film festival in India-Mumbai, with any luck.
Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Reach her at meenakshishedde@gmail.com
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