Film and TV
Film Around the World: Iran
The column that covers the best of cinema from around the world lands in Iran with The Apple, a tale of teenage discovery in repressive Iran, directed by seventeen year old Samira Mkhmalbaf.
Samira Makhmalbaf was seventeen years old when she made The Apple – the same age I was when I saw it for the first time. That late teenage tumult is all there: that lingering, just mellowing, anger and confusion at the growing differences between you and your parents which stem from starting to read more, watch more, and stay out for longer. Stemming from friends, from boyfriends, from seeing how other people live, think, communicate and from experiencing life outside of the bounds of your own home and family. Makhmalbaf, aged seventeen, imagines with a shudder what it would be like if we never had this independence: The Apple follows the progression of two twelve-year-old sisters locked inside their own home by their parents since the day they were born.
This gives a far more sinister impression, though, than the reality of the film. Massoumeh and Zahra’s unemployed father and blind mother hobble and fuss around their children, their daughters’ confinement revealed to be really a twisted extension only of their parent’s doting love and protection of them. There is a wider religious concern embodied in this excessive protectiveness, laying bare the stifling effect of the fundamentalist views of Islam on the treatment of women – the girls’ father emphatically explains mid-way through the film how different his children’s upbringing would have been had they been boys. His blind wife, the girls’ mother, cuts a striking image on screen in the heavy swathes of scarves covering her – surely another comment on the female position in Islam. She is faceless, speaking always through a darkened veil of cloth, turning towards her girls to chivvy them too into headscarves, or hauntingly, blindly, towards the camera. Her words come muffled through her thick veil, often unheard or ignored.
The girls, too, speak in an often indecipherable tongue, their mouths twisting to accommodate a language they do not fully comprehend. The sounds caught throughout the film retain an odd intensity – a baby crying in the neighbour’s house, the clanging of the girls’ metal spoons struck against the bars of their front gate, the delighted clack-clacking of their shoes against the pavement as they run down their street for the first time. It is this release from their home and family, a condensed coming of age and growing up that The Apple charts, following the first few days of the girls’ discovery of the outside world from when the social services first unlock the family’s door and push the girls into the dusty, sun-filled streets outside.
The camera remains steady as it follows the juddering wobble of the girls’ gait as they run down the streets after the local ice-cream seller, stumble across a game of hopscotch, and writhe and jump for an apple dangled from a neighbour’s window. The camera is often held low as if Makhmalbaf were crouching, hidden behind it, this observing presence just out of shot adding to the sense of the film as a documentary, of Makhmalbaf as reporter. The Apple certainly blurs the line between reality and fiction – not only is it based on a true story, but Zahra, Massouhmeh and their father are all played by the actual people whose story it dramatises.
This filming of real people over actors, this capturing of the poetry of the streets and of real life, is a feature common to the Iranian New Wave in cinema since the 1960s. Indeed, Samira Makhmalbaf’s career as a filmmaker is deeply indebted to her father’s, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s, films. He is a pioneering director of the Iranian New Wave, imprisoned – at that ever-significant age of seventeen – for an attack on a policeman. The four and a half years he spent in prison shaped his attitude on Iran, shifting his politics towards that of its intellectual renaissance in reaction to its ‘cultural poverty’, as he has described it.
The Apple has a hint of the political running through it – there is a certain romanticism to the girls’ discovery of other children, previously unseen places, and new ideas – of the world opening up before them in resistance to the authority of their parents. Through them Makhmalbaf captures a revolutionary strain still existent within Iran, and resurrects the revolutionary feeling of the New Wave Iranian cinema of the early ‘60s in reaction to the 1953 Iranian coup d’état. Most of all, though, the film is a celebration of childish fancy and invention, seen through the eyes of a teenager, and intended for the eyes of other young people. The film’s pastel colour palette of juicy shades of greens, reds, and pale pinks, the girls’ wide smiles as their upturned faces catch the last rays of the sun from the hazy sky, and the ever-present motif of the twirling apple that the girls excitedly chase after – all of these make Makhmalbaf’s film delightfully, indulgently, simple.
It captures a rebellion of the most honest, the most natural, kind – a rebellion against our parents, and a simple step into the world outside. Watching it again recently made me remember with relish the years I spent arguing with my parent’s views, and made me realise with greater relish the importance of living away from home. I urge you to watch The Apple simply to remember how good being a teenager was, how good it is to argue and challenge everything you know, and how good it feels to grow up.
Topics: Film, Film Around the World
