Movie Review: Rosewater

Rosewater (2014)

Four and Stars out of Five

R

Maziar Bahari: Gael García Bernal

Rosewater: Kim Bodnia

Baba Akbar: Haluk Bilginer

Molojoon: Shohreh Aghdashloo

Director: Jon Stewart

Writer: Jon Stewart

Book (“Then They Came for Me: A family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival”): Maziar Bahari, Aimee Molloy

Cinematography: Bobby Bukowski

Music: Howard Shore

Jon Stewart is well known as the host of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. In the summer of 2013, he left the show for several months as he went to Jordan to film his screenplay adaptation of Maziar Bahari’s memoir that detailed his 2009 prison ordeal in Iran; an ordeal that lasted 118 days in solitary confinement in Evin prison. That Stewart chose to film Bahari’s story is likely partly due to the fake interview Bahari gave to the Daily Show prior to his arrest wherein he was jokingly referred to as a spy by the Daily Show’s fake reporter, Jason Jones.

Stewart displays a deft touch behind the camera with respect to how he frames his scenes as well as how he introduces various novel film techniques to tell his story. For example, early in the film Bahari details his family’s history with the Savak (or secret police) under the Shah and the history of how the CIA worked to replace the democratically elected Mohammad Mossaddegh in 1953. As Bahari narrates his family’s torture at the hands of the Shah or the coup against Mossaddegh that placed the Shah in power, images related to the narration are shown in the background of a speeding motorcycle in various storefront windows. Later in the movie, Stewart also brings in a visual display of how repeating a series of names on the internet can increase their apparent importance, and thus their presumed truthiness (to borrow a term from Stephen Colbert).

Two other technical aspects of the movie were also impressive: the score by Howard Shore and the cinematography by Bobby Bukowski. In the case of the score, it worked very effectively to set the various mood of Bahari’s as his incarceration dragged on. A sense of pending doom was created by the score on the morning that Bahari was arrested. Later as the seriousness of his situation settles on him, the score again helped to reinforce the desperate state of his affairs. In the same manner, Bukowski captures the feeling of Teheran and the surrounding countryside. This disparity of bucolic country scenes or colorful urban views compared dramatically to the stark contrast of Bahari’s cell or the lonely courtyard where he can barely sense the sunlight. And note the fact that he could only sense not see the sunlight as he was blindfolded whenever he left his cell, and in fact, often when he was left in his cell.

This last point was one of the more vicious aspects of Bahari’s imprisonment. The mental torture that was daily inflicted on him was possibly more difficult to endure than the physical torture. In Stewart’s screenplay, the government of Mahmood Ahmadinejad sought to ruin Bahari’s reputation, not to simply incarcerate him. After the 2009 election was stolen by Ahmadinejad from his popular competitor, Mir Hossein Mousavi, the planning by the Ahmadinejad government that took place a year before the election became known outside of Iran. This planning was revealed to be that the Ahmadinejad regime planned on using foreign journalists such as Bahari as alleged spies working to discredit the Ahmadinejad “election”. This bears repeating: they created this plan one year in advance of the election. Thus, Bahari was arrested following the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, thrown into jail and tortured into confessing his crime of spying on Iran as a foreign journalist/spy. To get such a confession, it was thought by the Iranians that mental torture would be more effective than physical. To be sure, physical torture in the form of beatings also took place, but never to the face that Bahari would display to the Iranian TV cameras that would film his “confession”.

The dramatic tension of the movie is primarily between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and his deceased father, Baba Akbar (Haluk Bilginer). It is not clear how Baba died, but it is clear that he put up a heroic fight as a prisoner of the Savak in resisting their torture. Bahari ultimately decides that to be released from prison, to return to his wife and their newborn daughter in London is a far better choice than the ultimately pointless battle waged by his father. It raises a serious and thoughtful point: when does resistance of a single prisoner against a corrupt state truly become pointless. In Rosewater, the choice is shown to be a point that is well into the realm of human suffering, but short of death. Another dramatic scene takes place when Bahari is finally released into the arms of his mother, Molojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Bahari had been told as part of his torture than no one, not his mother, not anyone cared for his imprisonment, and yet four months later, there his mother is, at the prison’s gates. It is not stated firmly that she was notified of his pending release, but it is easy to believe that she (and many others waiting for their loved ones to be released) stood by those gates on a daily basis waiting for his release.

The acting by Bernal and by Kim Bodnia as Rosewater is particularly good. I would give perhaps higher marks to Bodnia than to Bernal as Rosewater is shown to be both a human and a monster. He must satisfy the whims of his supervisor and he yet slowly comes to rely to some degree on Bahari for some aspects of his own needs. Rosewater (so named by Bahari for the cologne the Bodnia character uses) at times beats Bahari unmercifully, and at other times sits quietly as Bahari relates made up (unknown to the gullible Rosewater) stories about his various adventures into massage parlors around the world. These tasteless stories might go on a bit too long in the movie, but they relate an odd vulnerability about Rosewater, and they suggest in a perverse manner his connection to Bahari, to any human. He isn’t just a monster, but in fact is a simple man, with a wife, and his own collection of weaknesses.

In the final analysis, Rosewater is a brief examination of a nation with a long history of art, of culture, of war, of proud traditions that has been captured by a theocratic form of fascism. The Iranians had their revolution and tossed the Shah, but they substituted for him a new totalitarian regime; one that uses the same prison, the same forms of torture, and the same of goal of self-perpetuation. There is little to no freedom in Iran, but ironically there is only a false sense of the Theocratic government they so loudly espouse. They are just one more group of people under the thumb of a clique of power mongers who have no goal but to stay in power. The bottom-line on this movie is that it is partially effective on showing an American audience a little more about what the Iranian people lost in 2009, a little about the kind of torture and falseness practiced by the Imams of Iran and their tools, but not too much more. Some of the acting is good, most of the cinematography is good, and the musical score is well written to highlight the various moods of the movie. It is a very good first effort for Jon Stewart as a writer/director.