It’s lovely to kick off a film festival with a banger, as I did at my first TIFF in 2010, when the first film I saw was the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job. And at my last TIFF in 2019, when the first film I saw was French Oscar nominee Les Misérables.
But Asghar Farhadi’s new film, A Hero, tops both of those. In many other countries, screenwriters are called “scenarists,” or writers of scenarios, and that’s how I prefer to think of Farhadi.
The genius of Farhadi’s films lies in their perfect conception and structure of immensely complicated moral dilemmas. It’s commonplace for many films to find their finished form in the edit, or to rely on great dialogue or stunning visuals to exert their power over us. But with Farhadi, the scenario is always the fundamental building block.
For A Hero, the classic theme being wrestled with is that no good deed goes unpunished. Amir Jadidi gives a wonderfully empathetic lead performance as Rahim, a man in debtors’ prison.
Rétrospective du Festival de Cannes: The Collector, 1965 (William Wyler)
While on temporary release Rahim plans to pay off his debts with the large sum of money found from a stranger’s purse, but he can’t bring himself to do it and instead returns the purse to its owner. The local media immediately declares Rahim a heroic role model for his selfless behavior, but then things start going wrong.
And I shall say no more regarding the plot, except that it ends with a perfectly devastating final shot every bit as good as the one that ends Farhadi’s 2011 Oscar-winning masterpiece, A Separation.
Amazon is planning a significant Oscar campaign for A Hero, and I would expect it to be a contender not just for Best International Film, but also in Best Director (which has included at least one foreign-film nominee in each of the last three years). And Best Original Screenplay (where Farhadi was already nominated once before, for A Separation).
I can’t remember the last time a film so effectively had me at Hello, but then spent the next 100 minutes slowly, methodically letting me go. Compartment No. 6 begins with the blaring of Roxy Music as brightly saturated title cards flash the opening credits in perfect rhythm with the immortal bass line from “Love is the Drug.”
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Now that’s how you start a movie; give me all the CINEMA! But to say the rest of Compartment No. 6 shares no relationship with that stylish and energetic intro is an understatement. The rest of the film has almost no energy whatsoever—style, pacing, music, chemistry, sexual tension, it’s all entirely sedate.
Compartment No. 6 (which shared the coveted Grand Prix award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival) is by Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen, whose previous film, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, won the top prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section five years ago. While I wasn’t in love with Olli Maki, I understood what people saw in it.
Here, I frankly don’t. The story is a riff on a meet cute on a Russian train, going north from Moscow to Murmansk (well into the Arctic Circle), and two mismatched compartment mates slowly form a bond. Or at least that’s what the film is trying to convince us is happening. But that’s not what I saw.
As the film continued to (slowly) unfold, my mind kept drifting back to that choice of intro music. It’s not just that “Love is the Drug” was a stylistic lie for the film that followed, it was a lyrical lie, too. Love is very much not the drug in Compartment No. 6. The actual drug is more of a behavioral roofie; it’s the old bro move of annoying the shit out of her until you’ve successfully gaslighted her into begrudgingly finding you almost sorta charming.
Rétrospective du Festival de Cannes: Melancholia, 2011 (Lars von Trier)
I recognize this move intimately because I tried it all the time when I was 19, before I grew the hell up (sort of). And sorry, but I would hope a film that wins a top prize at Cannes is smarter than I was at 19. Or, even if not completely smarter, at least woke enough to not launch an alleged meet cute with a drunk guy asking our heroine, “Are you here to sell your cunt?”
When that happened, the woman immediately went to ask the train conductor for another compartment, and I thought Okay, that wasn’t the main male character, that’s just the asshole she has to deal with before finding her soulmate. But the conductor refused to move her, and she went back to the room with the asshole. He, as I quickly realized, was the asshole Compartment No. 6 was sticking us with for the duration.
Watching the last 20-30 minutes of Attica felt like watching the first episode of Watchmen—the first time I had ever heard of the Tulsa Massacre—and I was just left with a pervasive, inescapable feeling of, “How did I not know about this? Why was I never taught about this?”
Attica begins unassumingly enough. The first hour or so is fairly standard PBS documentary fare, and it wasn’t quite as engaging as I was expecting. Because I’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon half a dozen times, I knew vaguely about the existence of the Attica Prison Riot in the early 1970s, and knew it was the longest and bloodiest prison riot in US history. But that was all I knew.
And the first hour of the documentary doesn’t add much to that vague knowledge beyond a bit more of the Hows and Whys, along with some great archival footage of the negotiations. But then things change, and they change in ways that will probably be seared into my brain forever.
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It’s a struggle to know what to write here, because if you don’t know the full details of how the Attica Prison Riot ended, then you shouldn’t hear it from me. You should find out by watching the movie and seeing the truly horrific footage that it brings to light (footage that was hidden from the public at the time).
But I’ll tell you—what I saw in Attica was even more shocking, more dehumanizing, more cruel and unusual than the video of George Floyd’s murder. It’s really that bad, and I don’t want to say any more except that this film left me truly shaken.
Attica was directed by Stanley Nelson, one of the great documentarians of African-American history. He’s also made films about Miles Davis, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the Black Panthers, the Freedom Riders, and the murder of Emmett Till, and he’s won three Emmys along the way.
I don’t know if Attica will be eligible for the Oscars, nor do I know if it’ll be nominated even if it’s eligible, because the Academy Documentary Branch can be pretty unpredictable and very beholden to agendas. But here’s what I do know—*if* Attica is nominated for the Documentary Oscar, it’s gonna be our winner. It’s simply too unforgettable not to win over the Academy at large.
I normally despise the political punditry talking point of “this is why they hate us,” but that’s exactly what kept popping into my mind while watching Hold Your Fire, a documentary about New York City’s longest hostage negotiation.
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Here’s the gist: in 1973, four young Black Muslims tried to steal a cache of guns from a Brooklyn sporting goods store to protect their families. But things went badly, resulting in a days-long hostage situation. Watching Hold Your Fire is a singularly weird experience. The two surviving perpetrators are incredibly empathetic and well-spoken, and they tell their story with aplomb.
Meanwhile, the NYPD officers involved in the situation who are interviewed in the film come across as varying degrees of racist. And by varying degrees, I mean from somewhat racist to deeply, horrifically, Holy-shit-did-he-really-say-that-on-camera level-racist. This is all, of course, pretty unsurprising. Given what we know about the NYPD, cops in general, and race relations in the early 1970s (particularly in poor urban areas), it makes perfect sense that this would all be the case.
But it also plays a deeply deceitful mind trick on you, making you forget that the guys with the hostages (no matter how understandable their initial intent) are the antagonists, and the cops (no matter how racist they may have turned out to be 50 years later) were trying to free those hostages. And they eventually did so, without killing any of the perpetrators. And that’s why I couldn’t stop thinking about that awful phrase, “this is why they hate us.”
Imagine trying to explain this movie to a conservative. And yes, I know—imagine trying to explain literally anything to a conservative. It’s a perilous thought. But our ongoing quest for racial justice and equity, and our contemporary knowledge on decades and decades of deep, systemic racism in policing, cannot obscure from our minds the basic facts that taking hostages is probably bad, and trying to free them is probably good.
Rétrospective du Festival de Cannes: Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero: stamattina alle 10, in via dei Fiori, nella nota casa di tolleranza… / Love and Anarchy, 1973
And it’s worth comparing Hold Your Fire with Attica, as both are about cops responding to Black perpetrators taking White hostages in New York in the early 1970s. But despite that seemingly intense similarity, the stories playing out really aren’t.
With Attica, the Black perpetrators did (nearly) everything right, the cops did everything wrong, several people died because of those wrong choices, and racism was almost the entire motivator of those choices. None of that is really the case with Hold Your Fire. The Black perpetrators weren’t in the right, the cops weren’t in the wrong, there were no Black casualties, and the racist beliefs held by the cops involved, while obvious 50 years later, didn’t seem to play much of a factor in how events unfolded at the time.
But watching any 10-15 minutes stretch of Hold Your Fire would absolutely convince you otherwise. This is why they hate us.
