Iranian drama ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ is a gripping knockout
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” — 3.5 stars
If the powerhouse Iranian drama “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” dramatizes the cruel ironies of existence in a theocratic state, the film’s writer-director, Mohammad Rasoulof, is living them.
Sentenced by the Islamic Revolutionary Court to flogging and eight years imprisonment during the film’s postproduction — his crime was “collusion with the intention of committing a crime against the country’s security” — Rasoulof fled Iran with little time to prepare, crossing a perilous mountain pass to ultimately find freedom in Germany. “Seed” was assembled by its editor, Andrew Bird, and made it to Cannes, where it won five awards, including a special jury prize; it’s Germany’s Oscar submission this year and has been nominated for a Golden Globe.
For all that, Rasoulof has made a family film, or rather, a film about two families: a patriarch, his wife and their increasingly rebellious daughters, and, metaphorically, the fracturing family that is Iran itself. At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”
The patriarch is Iman (Missagh Zareh): a good man, a loving husband and father and a Tehran lawyer who, when the film opens, has just been promoted to the government position of investigating judge, charged largely with approving verdicts handed down by the court. It’s a rubber-stamp job, to his dismay, but it brings a larger apartment and salary and the promise of better things. The family is proud.
The timing, however, couldn’t be worse. It’s September 2022 and the streets are erupting in furious anti-government protests following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman arrested by the morality police for wearing tight pants and an improperly tied headscarf. Spearheading the rage is an impromptu army of young women, college students and high school girls chanting, “woman, life, freedom” in the most widespread revolt since the country’s 1979 revolution.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” shows the effects of this tidal wave of resistance on one family: a widening crack of paranoia that ultimately pits Iman against the women in his life. His wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), is initially as devoted and devout as he is and fearful that their daughters will get caught up in the mayhem. Iman, forced by his superiors to sign dozens of daily death sentences as the protests increase, is just terrified for his family and future.
The daughters are city girls, though, well-versed in social media and the art of living below their parents’ radar, and although they’re not on the front lines of the revolt, their schoolmates are. The older of the two, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami), is more vocal about pushing back against the regime and has marched among the throngs with her bolder friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi). Younger daughter Sana (Setareh Maleki) watches and simmers and keeps her own counsel, but one senses she’s the more radical of the two.
Rasoulof poses a brutally simple question to Iman and to the audience: In an Orwellian dictatorship, is your first allegiance to your family or the government? Iman thinks he knows the answer (and maybe you do, too), but as “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” tightens its grip — as secrets spill out and violence comes into the house — he understands that everything the girls do jeopardizes his career and their lives.
And that’s before his gun goes missing.
Iman has been issued a pistol with his new job, but he nervously stores it out of sight, and at a certain point it mysteriously disappears and becomes a source of widening panic and suspicion. The spiral has begun, and “Seed” observes the slow process by which a man can come to treat his wife and daughters as enemies of the state. There’s an interrogation that’s a brute portrayal of bureaucratic depersonalization and a steadily dawning realization among the daughters — and, finally, Iman’s wife — that the phone call is coming from inside the house.
The entire cast is fine, but Golestani as Najmeh travels the broadest dramatic distance, from loving spouse to disillusioned realist; the role, the actress and the performance all call to mind Norma Aleandro’s towering work in the 1985 Oscar winner “The Official Story.”
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” grows more extreme as the family heads out of Tehran to a deserted mountain village for a final showdown in a landscape reduced to the elemental and symbolic — a religious patriarchy’s last stand. That missing gun has assumed Chekhovian proportions by now. When it finally goes off, it stands to bring a man, his house and an entire society crashing to the ground.
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At AMC River East 21 in Chicago. Rated PG-13 for disturbing violent content, bloody images, thematic content, some language and smoking. 168 minutes.