The Seed of the Sacred Fig: A Way Must Be Made

Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani in Mohammad Rasoulof's The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Part political chronicle, part thriller and part family drama, the Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof, is complex and terrifying. Like Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, released last summer, it captures an ongoing situation so disturbing that we can’t shake it off when we leave the theatre. Its focus is on Iman (Missagh Zareh), who works in the justice system, and on his family: his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two teenage daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), who is at university, and Sana (Setareh Maleki), still in high school. Iman has just been promoted to interrogator, which puts him on track to become a judge, a distinction that brings with it not just a more enviable salary but also a larger house. But as his colleague, Ghaderi (Reza Akhlaghirad), cautions him, the job is dangerous because those who believe they have been charged unjustly may seek revenge on him and his family. It carries moral perils as well: Iman, who has behaved with strict rectitude during a twenty-year career, is immediately asked to sign off on a wiretapping without having a chance to read the file; when he hesitates, his supervisor overrides him. And things get worse. Tehran has been swept up in protests over the arrest of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab improperly, and her suspicious death in custody, he is pressured to confirm death indictments against other young people, one a boy the same age as Rezvan.

Echoes of a Vanishing World: Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times

The cast of Last Landscape. (Photo by Fran Chudnoff.)

A droning litany of environmental crises emanates from a laptop in a cramped, cardboard-walled apartment. Outside, a dog’s incessant barking punctuates the claustrophobic atmosphere. This unsettling opening of Last Landscape at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre thrusts us into a world teetering on the brink of ecological collapse, as envisioned by Toronto-based theatre artist Adam Paolozza, the show’s creator and director.

Short Cuts

Flow. (Courtesy of Janus Films.)

Flow: This gorgeous-looking animated film from Latvia, written by Gints Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza and directed by Zilbalodis, is one of the few treasures of a disappointing holiday season. Set in a jungle in the wake of a tsunami, it seems to take place at the end of the world – there are no human beings in it, and the animals who populate it travel on a deserted sailboat. Its subject is the surprising harmony of living creatures who need to look to each other to survive. Flow has an obvious underlying melancholy, but it’s sweet and playful. The protagonist is a cat, a natural loner who is befriended by a secretary bird, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a Labrador. The most striking relationship is between the cat and the secretary bird, whose attempt to reach out with an offering of freshly caught fish is met with hostility from his pack, who ostracize him and step on his wings so he can’t fly away with them. On the boat with the others, the cat reciprocates; he also figures out how to navigate the bird’s regal pride. This coming together of two solitary creatures in a strange, almost mystical friendship is the most touching element of the film but far from the only one.

Argonaut of Modernity: Impersonating Pessoa

“You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely.”

--Machado de Assis

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

This new entry into the modernist archive by CultureLab member Bartholomew Ryan, Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa, sheds fresh and welcome light on one of the most mysterious and elusive figures in the annals of contemporary literary culture. He was, in fact, not only a prototypical modernist, but also a stylistic harbinger of the amorphous postmodern ethos long before it even existed. The French writer Jules Michelet once declaimed, “Each epoch dreams the era to follow it.” Pessoa seems to have been the brilliant dreamer who imagined the relativistic and quantum-drenched psychological environment in which we currently dwell. Assis certainly knew whereof he spoke, for both he and his younger countryman Pessoa may have bravely contemplated the very shaky future we all live in now as a wobbly present.

Narcissism Disguised As Altruism

I have a confession: for eighteen months, I’ve been addicted to Sixteen Tons Entertainment’s Emergency(2023, a.k.a. Emergency [Free to Play]), the latest entry in a real-time strategy (RTS) series (1998–) created by Ralph Stock. I’ve gone cold turkey twice, and every time the game has haunted my daydreams and nightmares till I downloaded it again. Now I just accept that I’ll have to spend half an hour each day on this thing.

Coming of Age as an Apologue – and the Reverse

Elliott Heffernan and Saiorse Ronan in Steve McQueen's Blitz. (Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Apple TV+.)

Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, set in September 1940, in the early days of Hitler’s incessant bombing of London, is an obvious labor of love. It takes place over just a couple of days, during which Rita (Saiorse Ronan), an armaments factory worker, puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), on a train bound for the countryside with other children but he jumps out and tries to make his way back to Stepney, the working-class neighborhood where he lives with Rita and her father (Paul Weller); he never knew his father, who is African and was deported unjustly after a street fight. Production designer Adam Stockhausen’s recreations of the period are gorgeous, as is the cinematography by Yorick Le Soux, the favorite collaborator of the French director Olivier Assayas. The editing by Peter Sciberras is masterful: it actualizes McQueen’s remarkable sense of rhythm, which was showcased in his Small Axe series and especially in Lovers Rock. The film is propelled forward, moving back and forth between Rita and her wayward boy with remarkable fluidity and from one London location to another so that the continuity is simultaneously whole-cloth and fragmented. It contains a number of beautifully constructed setpieces that rank with the finest work that has been done with this period in film. And along the way McQueen takes care to pay homage to some of its predecessors: Hope and Glory, Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Atonement. (There’s also a subplot out of Oliver Twist and a speech in an underground shelter by a left-wing character, played by Leigh Gill, who seems to have been inspired by Agate in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.)

Genius is Pain: A Complete Unknown

Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown. (Photo: Macall Polay. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.)

Long conflicted on its subject, I was reluctant to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s biopic of the young Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), which traces his development from a barbed-wire folksinger to the sleek provocateur who caused a near-riot at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by assailing a crowd of purists with noisy, abstract blues rock. (“Dylan goes electric” is the legendary summa, as well as the title of the Elijah Wald book on which Mangold and Jay Cocks based their screenplay.) But people I value kept saying the movie was better than they’d expected, and it turns out they were right. More than that, though. Still reeling a bit from The Philosophy of Modern Song, I've had difficulty wanting to listen to Dylan these past two years. This movie snapped me out of that, precisely by taking me past the artist and into the art, the limits of one into the free skies of the other.

Off the Shelf: Life Is What Happens to You While You’re Busy Making Other Plans: House

The cast of House. From left: Omar Epps, Olivia Wilde, Robert Sean Leonard, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Edelstein, Jesse Spencer, Jennifer Morrison, Peter Jacobson. (Photo: Joe Viles/NBC.)

I despise prestige television. Art relies on limitations, and narrative is an architecture. Thirteen hours of a single story deprives you of both, and “fleshing out” each character’s backstory is just exploring so many blind alleys. No, give me episodic television anytime.

Time Transfixed: The Momentary Music of Hemisphere

“My desire was not to compose, but to project sounds into time, free from any compositional rhetoric. Music which specifically defined pitch but allowed the temporal dimension to remain indeterminate, thus creating a sonic world where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.”

Morton Feldman

To become transfixed is to be rendered motionless with wonder, to be immobilized by astonishment. To some extent it touches upon the condition which in more classical eras was associated with what was known as the sublime, a state akin to awe. The sublime is still with us, of course, but it is often sublimated since the course of modernism conducted its now well-known radical discontinuity. This was especially the case in the domain of music, which is a durational art, one occurring strictly as momentary sonic situations, relying historically on the laws of harmony in order to soothe the savage breast. The aleatory and organic flow of what became known as “new music,” however, tended to naturally embrace dissonance in a manner which celebrates time transfixed. If we try to imagine the notion of time transfixed we can also determine how frozen time might amount to space itself: to hear and see them as one in the same quantum thing, or, in Zen terms, no-thing.

New on Broadway: Eureka Day, Death Becomes Her and Swept Away

From left: Thomas Middleditch, Amber Gray, Bill Irwin, Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz, and Jessica Hecht in Eureka Day. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Eureka Day premiered in a production by Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company half a dozen years ago, and it’s finally arrived on Broadway via off-Broadway (in 2019) and London (in 2022). Written by Jonathan Spector and directed by Anna D. Shapiro, it’s a sensationally funny satire of contemporary woke communities – about the impossibility of reaching consensus among progressive people who are trying painfully hard to maintain, or at least convey, sensitivity to each other’s viewpoints when reality seems to have deliquesced into a bog of ferociously held competing opinions. The characters we meet are five members of the board of a private Berkeley elementary school called Eureka Day School who find they have to meet a crisis: a mumps epidemic that divides the parents, some of whom believe in traditional medical practices and some of whom resolutely do not. The school’s middle-aged director is Don, who has a gentle manner and almost bottomless patience but whose demeanor, as Bill Irwin plays him, suggests that his desperation to keep an even keel and indicate respect toward all the other voices in the room has been eating away at him. (He’s like one of Christopher Durang’s befuddled heroes, but without the repressed anger that flares up suddenly every now and then.) Eli (Thomas Middleditch) is a tech billionaire and young father whose generosity has funded the struggling school’s various initiatives, like an all-gender washroom. Eli’s son and the daughter of another board member, Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz), are good friends, and their play dates enable the adults to engage in extramarital games of their own; though Eli claims that he and his wife have an open relationship, it turns out that either he’s misrepresented the situation to Meiko or else he and his wife don’t necessarily agree on the rules. The latest addition to the group is Carina (Amber Gray), a Black woman whose perspective, according to the longest-running member, Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), is particularly welcome. Suzanne articulates that view euphemistically, but it comes across as presumptuous and condescending – especially since Carina, like the others, comes from a comfortable middle-class background. But Suzanne is a genius at spurious apologies that sound perfectly sincere, so the colleagues who find her putting words in their mouths tend to trip over themselves when they call her out on it, or come across as more brusque than they’d intended.