I haven’t the faintest idea what Nun va Goldoon means in English, but an online Farsi-English dictionary translates nun as “tree trunk,” which suits neither title by which this Iranian film goes: Bread and Flower; A Moment of Innocence. I suspect the latter; but the crucial (and conclusive) shot that encapsulates the “moment of innocence” includes both bread and a flower. Whatever. Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film is terrific—Kandahar (2001) notwithstanding, probably his finest achievement. I have been all across the map of appreciation in my responses to Makhmalbaf’s films, finding fault with many examples that others have pronounced masterful, and I have even been in the habit of declaring Makhmalbaf’s gifted daughter, Samira, the better filmmaker (The Apple, 1997; Blackboards, 2000—both co-written with her father). Seeing Nun va Goldoon changes all that. Pop can be just as wonderful as daughter Samira.
Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Closeup (1990), in which Mohsen Makhmalbaf appears as Mohsen Makhmalbaf in its dramatization of an actual incident, Nun va Goldoon is self-reflexive, testing assumptions about life and cinema. Makhmalbaf, playing himself, is making a film, and we’re along for the rich ride.
Twenty years earlier, in the Iran ruled by Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, a vicious long-term dictator whose repressive measures against dissidents incited the Islamic Revolution, Makhmalbaf was a 17-year-old activist and idealist, who was imprisoned for stabbing a 20-year-old police officer whose revolver he tried to steal. After four years and the end of the Shah’s reign, Makhmalbaf was released. Now he has reunited with the former officer to make a film about the event. We learn that the one-time policeman has had an enormously hard time since the wounding event. He has bitterly regretted the course his life has taken as a result of that incident. That day, he had been trying to work up the courage to present a potted flower to a girl who was in the habit of passing by while he was on his street watch. That day, there she was, asking him for the time; by coincidence, it seemed, her being there facilitated Makhmalbaf’s assault, and since then she has married someone else and had a daughter, consigning the officer to haunt the land of might-have-been. In the course of the film shoot, for which he is advising the young actor who is playing him, a role in which he had hoped to have been cast so he might recapture that moment of innocence, the officer learns that the girl he shyly loved and boldly dreamt about was, in fact, Makhmalbaf’s cousin—Makhmalbaf’s accomplice in the assault on him. It was her job to distract him that fateful day. Thus he is now harshly confronted with the miserable waste of his lifelong pining for this girl—the puppy love he never had a chance to get over.
Meanwhile, Makhmalbaf advises the boy who is playing him in the film’s reconstruction of the twenty-year-ago event. He casts a teenager who, at the open audition, professes to wanting to save the world. Ah, Makhmalbaf also is trying to recapture a lost moment of innocence. But there are consequences even now. The girl who is playing his cousin will distract the boy officer so that the boy playing him, Makhmalbaf, will draw the blade hidden beneath the bread he is carrying and stab the officer. This time, the officer, directed onto it by the disillusioned actual officer, will shoot the girl before he is stabbed. The boy playing Makhmalbaf breaks down, falls apart; how can he stab anybody? What will that accomplish? There must be a better way of “saving the world.” Back on track, the boy is determined to do what Makhmalbaf has instructed him to do. The girl plays her part, asking the officer for the time over and over again. The boy playing Makhmalbaf approaches to commit the assault, but the officer does not peremptorily shoot the girl. At the point of decision, two things suddenly, unexpectedly, happen involving the bread and the flower—a new moment of innocence that perhaps, just perhaps, redeems the past.
This is a great work in which the puppetmaster, filmmaker Makhmalbaf, discovers he cannot control his puppets—although it is deliciously impossible to determine just what he has predetermined as the author of the (brilliant) script. Is the kid’s breakdown for real? Did the officer really not know the girl was his assailant’s accomplice? Did Makhmalbaf really not know the officer did not know? Here is a degree of playfulness one doesn’t easily ascribe to Makhmalbaf, whose films are usually dry and grim. And when has he been this sharply observant of humanity?
Who knows what precisely happened way back when? The film’s reconstruction of the long-ago event slips into a new reality before our eyes, affecting the actors, apparently, as profoundly as the long-ago event affected its actors on the Iranian political stage. And Makhmalbaf and the officer get to see just how clumsy they were in their youth.
What does Makhmalbaf know and when did he first know it? I don’t know, but I know this: Nun va Goldoon busts the border between past and present, fiction and documentary, controlled and spontaneous cinema. Makhmalbaf has either devised or lucked into a masterpiece, in which the first snowfall slips the color film, magically, into black and white, teasing us early on to question everything we see, and shot after shot is haunted by some mystery of the past that dissolves like snowflakes on fingertips. Let me add that every composition is elegant and beautiful, the pure essence of cinema.
Tags: Iranian cinema
