I’ve watched two Iranian movies over the prior two evenings. The one from yesterday, “Under the Shadow,” was a bit hokey at the end, a ghost story that devolved into some silly effects, but which certainly created an atmosphere of dread compounded of the supernatural and the all-too-real (war), an effective and novel juxtaposition. “Under the Shadow” also suffered from a horrible job of English dubbing, singsong readings layered on top of the film like bad makeup. Why would a film editor elect to do that, rather than simply adding subtitles, so that one could at least experience the real actors’ voices?
In both films, the actors live in apartments threatened with destruction by omnipresent conflict. It is this marination in a daily battle against death that gives them both a serious, essential quality completely absent from most American movies.
The one from Friday, “The Salesman,” was more skillfully made. It too dealt with dread, but of a more existential variety, the horrors happening off-camera, and the real question being, not what would befall the principal characters, but what would the course of events reveal about the characters themselves. The director, Asghar Farhadi, has apparently made at least two other movies, all of which seem well worth watching; “About Elly” in particular seems noteworthy. Two other films, “The Past,” and “A Separation” also seem worth ferreting out.