Marriage of the Blessed

Haji (Mahmud Bigham) is a photojournalist reeling from PTSD suffered during the Iran-Iraq war.  Upon his release from a psychiatric hospital, he learns that a betrothal has been arranged for him.  However, he is haunted by his experiences… typewriters sound like machine gun fire, and he’d rather watch footage of starving children in Africa than family snapshots.  With a new-found social conscience, he and his bride-to-be take to the streets, capturing social ills, wielding their camera like weapons.  Will Haji get his shit together in time for the wedding, or does he have more important things on his addled mind?

Makhmalbaf often works in a more unusual idiom than one expects from Iranian cinema, from the poetic tableaus of Gabbeh to the heightened stylization of The Cyclist.  This film, one of his earlier works, amps up the cinematic flourishes severely.  Much use is made of the subjective viewpoints, with Haji’s nightmarish fantasies come to life, or cameras being mounted on all sorts of moving objects (the movie opens with a shot mounted on the medicine cart travelling through the halls of the hospital).  When his fiancée spills a drink on a picture of him, the color vanishes from the picture, and the remainder plays out in monochrome (except for flashbacks to the conflict), suggesting a change in Haji’s viewpoint, an increased awareness of the dismal realities of the world around him.

The stylizations are often rather over the top.  I’m not sure the film would work better in a subdued, realist style, but there is an overeager amateurishness to much of it.  The retarded brother character, the manic head-jerking, the extreme angles… a bit more restraint would have been appreciated.  But there are some very interesting touches (in the background behind Haji, a line of soldiers marches in one direction, then a line of wheelchair-bound patients proceed in the other direction).  Not as effective as A Moment of Innocence or The Silence, but an intriguing work.  Rating: Good

IMDb