Hamoun (1990)

Allegedly, Iranian critics in 1997 selected this as Iran's best picture ever, tho I can't find a solid citation for this repeated claim. At any rate, it doesn't appear to rate that high on any international list of more recent vintage, but it still enjoys high esteem.

Hamid Hamoun (Khosro Shakibai) is already under a bit of stress -- amid work at an import-export firm, study for a Ph.D., and effort to establish himself as a writer -- when his wife of seven years, Mahshid (Bita Farahi), blindsides him by suing for divorce. Against lawyer advice, he doesn't acquiesce, hoping to rekindle her love or at least understand, partly via flashbacks, why that won't happen. People start accusing him of mental instability, and as he fails to find comfort or satisfying answers, that assessment becomes increasingly true.

Let me get my biggest complaint out of the way up front: This DVD badly needs an edition with better subtitles and/or a dubbing option. First, the words are white with no outline, so whenever they appear against a white background, they're basically illegible. Second, I heard a lot more syllables than I saw, suggesting that we non-Farsi speakers miss a lot of dialog regardless of whether we can read it. Sometimes someone talks and there are no words on screen. The subtitles are also riddled with errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but those don't do nearly as much to impede our comprehension.

Fortunately, this doesn't seem to be the sort of storytelling where you can't afford to miss a few lines. The plot progresses slowly, characters often repeat the gist of their points, and the lines apparently go for credibility over quotability. It's like A Serious Man in some ways, including imagination sequences that can sometimes be mistaken for reality.

One thing that Hamoun has in common with my favorite Iranian flick, A Separation, is that neither side of the conflict is entirely without merit. Mahshid can be difficult to live with. As a former aristocrat, she has expensive hobbies for his income, and putting her heart into abstract art -- which she deems ruined by a stray paint splash -- is sure to leave a lot more people than Hamid nonplussed. But Hamid does cross the line into spousal abuse, verbal and physical, and chalking it up to occasional distracted frustration does little to score him points with anyone. Indeed, he strikes me as a never-my-fault type. On more than one occasion, he bumps hard into someone he could easily have noticed in time.

One difference from AS is a fair amount of background music well before the end credits. It's synth-heavy, which I found unexpected but not unpleasant in context. There are other concessions to international culture, such as talk of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Is the movie relatable from a foreign perspective? Well, I don't think a modern American divorce case would play out the same way, but that's about it. The statement that all men are tyrants to women might be more accurate of Iran, but you can find the same attitude over here. Even Hamid's religious treatise isn't particularly Islamic, with its focus on Abraham.

Hamoun is big on artistic angst. See it when you're in that kind of mood, as long as you have a high tolerance for poor subbing.