Director: Asghar Farhadi
Starring: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust, and Maryam Shahdaei
Distributor: Hi Gloss Entertainment
Runtime: 128 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan

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Rating notes: Mild themes, violence and coarse language

This Iranian film tells the story of a man in Iran who was imprisoned for a debt he couldn’t pay, and he tries to convince his accuser to withdraw his complaint. It was awarded the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.

The film is about a man who took steps to return a bag of gold coins found while he was on leave from a debtor’s prison in the city of Shiraz, Iran. Director Farhadi won the Grand Prix at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival for the film, as well as being awarded Best Original Screenplay by the National Board of Review.

Farhadi is a director of great distinction, who shot to international fame with his film, A Separation, which won the Ecumenical prize and the Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. He is now the most famous figure in Iranian cinema. The film is complex and offers viewers an intricate and complex moral tale. It covers issues related to personal conscience, family allegiances and recriminations, as well as personal loyalty and betrayal. Farhadi has an extraordinary capacity to portray real-life conflicts, and family dynamics in minute detail. His films typically motivate viewers to become emotionally involved in the fates of the people involved. Plots typically communicate family environments in which humanity, or the absence of it, plays out in detail.

In this film, Rahim Soltani (Jadidi) has been imprisoned for a debt he cannot pay. Under Iranian law, Rahim can be freed only if he pays off the debt, or the person he owes ‘forgives’ the debt. Rahim is released from prison for a two-day period to settle the debt to his brother-in-law, Bahram (Tanabandeh). Bahram, however, is not inclined to forgive the debt. Farkondeh (Goldust), Rahim’s girlfriend, finds a lost handbag with 17 gold coins in it, and she and Rahim plan to use the coins to pay off the debt. The coins are not enough, however, and the debt cannot be paid in full. Rahim’s sister, Malileh (Shahdaei), entreats Rahim to find the handbag’s true owner and return the bag and its coins. When it becomes known that he has taken steps to find the original owner, Rahim becomes a celebrity, and arrangements are made for Rahim’s release from prison. Because of his actions, Rahim becomes ‘the talk of the neighbourhood’, television and the media pursue him, and a charity organisation tries to raise money on his behalf. Then, things go wrong.

Bahram is suspicious of Rahim’s story and refuses to ‘forgive’, and thinks he should be exposed. Rahim eventually is forced to face the truth, and after much family bickering, moral recriminations, and exposés, he returns to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. The film does not paint Rahim as ‘a hero’. Instead, it portrays him as a victim of opportunism, who pays the price for his deception and acts of dishonesty, except for a moving final moral act as a father. The movie explicitly targets the ethics of institutions which want to turn human activity to their financial advantage, unforgiving behaviours, family entanglements, social mistrust, and failed financial ventures. Issues affect major and minor characters. Throughout, Farhadi’s movie engenders cultural insights about morality, legal injustice, and gender and social inequality. The film further communicates thoughts on children, who pay a price for their parents’ mistakes, as well as the transitory nature of fame.

Under Farhadi’s masterful direction, the film becomes a thought-provoking, powerful movie about how seemingly moral behaviour can be deceptive. The movie is a cautionary one. It starts off with good humour and cheer, but progresses under Farhadi’s direction to become something quite different. His multilayered approach turns an extraordinarily tense film into a riveting one morally, with wide human relevance. The movie is a culturally fascinating and stimulating film about social, and moral dilemmas that exist in modern Iranian society, and it is another of Farhadi’s cinema masterpieces.