Meenakshi Shedde: Surreal stunner

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 Haghighirsquos A Dragon Arrives Ejhdeha Vared Mishavad is one such For me it was the equivalent of that adrenaline shot stabbed into Uma Thurmanrsquos 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 Itrsquos been a grey rainy week so I cheered myself up by recalling a recent film that made my heart soarA still from A Dragon ArrivesThis 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 GulfDetective 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 Shahrsquos SAVAK secret police The story is told by a series of unreliable narrators It seems that the dead prisoner has been murdered and that Qeshmrsquos 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 tregraves cool effeminate man with exquisite good taste in floral furlined jackets rather postrsquo64 who feeds an abandoned infant with a white balloon teat on a milk bottleThe film offers many subplots therersquos even a Hitchcock moment as Haghighi appears onscreen discussing The Brick and the Mirror a film his grandfather Ebrahim Golestan directed in 1964 Another subplot involves the missing daughter of an ophthalmologist and former sharkhunter what a careerswitch Therersquos even a small sequence with Indian migrants in turbansCinematographer Houman Behmanesh is stylish and imbues the film with saturated colours and Christophe Rezairsquos technotrance 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 desertscapesHaghighi 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 Farhadirsquos 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 IndiaMumbai with any luckMeenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival awardwinning critic curator to festivals worldwide and journalist Reach her at meenakshisheddegmailcom