who are you? who am i?
Jon
Stewart (writer and director, based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy), Rosewater / 2014
There is a great
deal in Jon Stewart’s first film documentary, Rosewater, to want to
like. The very fact that a noted news-casting-entertainer—recognizing his The Daily Show as the unintentional
causation of a journalist’s arrest in Iran—would take out time to make a movie
about that man’s experiences is news in itself, just as the print and
television media have treated it. The film’s depiction of the facts surrounding
Maziar Bahari’s (Gael García Bernal) coverage of the 2009 presidential election
and the so-called “Green Revolution” in that country, his sudden arrestment and
imprisonment (for 118 days) in Teheran’s notorious Evin Prison, and his (and
the movie’s) determination to give witness to the hundreds of other
lesser-known journalists formerly and currently imprisoned, make for a notable
subject of humanitarian significance.
Accordingly as Stewart’s work begins with Bahari’s
having to leave his beloved and pregnant wife in London for a few days of
reporting, we settle back for what suggests it will be a revealing work. If
Bahari, reporting for Newsweek, seems
a little dissociated from his homeland, and, we soon discover, he is almost
clueless about others of his quite informed generation still in Iran, who bravely
defy governmental edicts, we might credit this to his focus on becoming a new
father and the several years he has spent in the West. But when we soon
discover that both Bahari’s father and sister were arrested and tortured by
different regimes and for different reasons, we begin to wonder if Bahari isn’t
just a little bit dense in the head, at least as presented by the director. In
fact, we never quite get to find out who this unfortunate journalist really is.
Stewart attempts to link the son to the
past, suggesting his mixed feelings about returning to his home country, by hitting
the viewer over the head—plastering billboards, shop windows and others of the
city’s surfaces with images from his memory. And unfortunately, this
heavy-handed technique hints at further directorial missteps, replacing psychologically-induced
imagery for what might have been more effectively communicated through narrative
events. In fact, the whole first third of this film, when Bahari quickly picks
up a taxi cab driver to become his guide, is filled with all sorts of bits of
information that, if fleshed out, might have given the entire film—particularly
the work’s central scenes within prison—more dimension. We want to know more
about Bahari’s communist-leaning father, his beloved, politically involved
sister, and his gently-enduring mother. We are fascinated by the driver (who,
Bahari soon discovers, owns no taxi, only a bicycle) and his friends’ open
commitment to world-wide information through what they joke is “dish
university,” joyfully demonstrating a series of forbidden dish satellites
hidden upon a mid-sized building roof. How did they come to be so politically
savvy? Or are they merely demonstrating a braggadocio in the face of the
menacing political forces in which they enmeshed? Did the younger generation
truly imagine that Abmadinejad’s opponent might really be allowed to win the
election? Once again, Stewart washes over the real issues with amateur
gimmicks, flashing the dissident’s joyful display of their half-hidden
communications center with animated maps and arrows representing emails and
tweets.
One might forgive these clumsy visual
displays as emanating from Stewart’s lack of experience. But, alas, his
decision to take the easy route instead of the more difficult one, continues
throughout much of the film. We never really do get to know Bahari, his family,
or his new-found friends, and the film suffers from that lack of knowledge: why
should we care so desperately for this likeable reporter, and how could he not
of guessed that his activities in the city, including his comic gesture of
commenting on spying activities on The
Daily Show, and, most importantly, his actually photographing of an attack
and murder at a local military station, would not lead to his arrest? If history
has taught us anything, you do not need to have done anything illegal to be
perceived as being guilty, not only in dictator-based countries, but often even
in so-called democracies such as jolly-old England and the gold ole US. That
such a savvy comedian such as Stewart would miss the opportunity to bring that
idea home, one feels, is a loss for our times. Are we (not only Americans, but
westerners far removed from the internal struggles within Iran) involved in any
way with the events in this picture? Why, one wonders, did Stewart so clearly
want to bring this story to the screen if he did not intend to explore its
larger ramifications?
Jeff Myers, in the Orlando Weekly, asked questions very similar in his review of
November 19, 2014:
Not only does the
growing threat to independent journalist go
unexamined, Stewart
fails to connect Iran’s behavior with our
own. It isn’t hard to recognize that
Bahari’s incarceration and
enhanced interrogation
echo the situation in Guantanamo Boy,
and that Ahmadinejad’s
criminalization of reporters and pro-
testors has its
equivalencies here. One has only to recall the
actions by police in
Ferguson, Missouri, to see the connections.
Once we are locked away, with Bahari, in
the prison, the movie tightens up some and explores ideas more complexly.
Stewart is smart, I would argue, to present the grand inquisitor of his hero “Rosewater”
(Kim Bodnia) (dubbed so because he smells of the perfume he dabs upon his
nearly-always sweating carcass) as an ordinary man, trying to accomplish a mean
and demeaning task within the confines of a brutal bureaucracy. Even a torturer,
Stewart makes clear, has to come to his job each day ready to endure the pushes
and pulls of both his emotional and physical abuses. The fact that “Rosewater”
is isolated in a country that doesn’t always allow access to Western thinking
(and the same might be said of so many countries in which these torturers
exist) works to his disadvantage. There is something almost painfully touching
about his absurd misconceptions revealed through questions such as “Who is that
Anton Chekov mentioned in your Facebook profile?” “Why did you travel so many
times to New Jersey?” and, most obviously, “Why did you claim to be in league
with a spy on the television show?” Bahari’s reply only points out the
unanswerable absurdity of the questions themselves: “Why would a spy have a
television show?”
There is almost a joyful righteousness
when Bahari, finally coming to perceive that instead of battling absurdity he
should go with the flow, begins to spin mad tales of his addiction to massages
that forces him to travel to New Jersey for such a pitch of sexual pleasure
that it might possibly end in death, as well as linking that addiction to the “pornography”
his inquisitor suspects exists in the many movies they have found on Bahari’s
computer, including Pasolini’s Teorema. In
short, Stewart is satirically competent when it comes to demonstrating the
banality of evil.
But even here, at times, Stewart muddles
his clever narrative with the overly clichéd visions of Bahari’s father and
sister in conversation with the son and brother. In literalizing fantasy in a
world of fantastical accusations the director almost aligns himself with the
purported enemy. And, while the look Stewart has created of the prison—through a
series of white-washed, fairly clean warrens for isolation—may be accurate, it
makes it difficult for us to believe in the horrors the prisoner is undergoing.
Surely, isolation (blindfolded for long periods of time) for nearly four months
in any quarters might drive anyone mad, and the terror of feeling forgotten and
abandoned—effectively indoctrinated by the prison officials—helps to break down
even the most intellectually fortified being. When he does admit his guilt,
Bahari’s bland recitation of force-fed statements is almost meaningless to his
captors. And when he accidentally is described as “Mr. Hilary Clinton” by a
guard, the prisoner suddenly perceives his case is not only unforgotten but has
been internationally discussed.
These moments represent highs in an
otherwise rather ineffective recounting of events, however. As overwrought and
melodramatic as movies such as Midnight
Express are, we come to better understand the psychological effects of prison
life than in Stewart’s wryer and drier presentation.
I’m willing to give Stewart the benefit of
his inexperience; perhaps, if he desires to become one, he may someday become
an intelligent and effective director. But I was disappointed that he botched
so much of this potentially revelatory, even important, document.
Los Angeles,
November 30, 2104
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (December
2014).
