Iranian actor-director Niki Karimi has created a very involved film, clotted with anger and pain, straining towards some emotional meaning or resolution which, for me, never satisfyingly emerges. She has co-written it with the film’s leading man, Hadi Hejazifar who with unsmiling intensity plays Kazem, a respected architect bearing the honorific “atabai”, (meaning roughly “great man”). Kazem returns to his home village near Iran’s Lake Urmia (an important tourist attraction) after some time away, and his homecoming opens old wounds within him.
This home village was where his sister took her own life, after abuse from the man to whom she was forced into marriage by their cruel father, while secretly in love with Kazem’s best friend, whom Kazem now despises for not fighting for her. Now Kazem finds that his sister’s hated husband has cynically sold the beautiful orchard which was part of the dowry he received, to cover his debts. But the man who has bought it has two daughters – and Kazem finds himself falling in love with one of them.
This is a curious film: acted and directed with great sincerity, impeccable formal control, an obvious feel for the landscape – and interesting use of voiceover, unusual in Iranian cinema. Yet the central narrative element of Kazem falling in love, and another woman falling in love with him, feels underdramatised and unconvincing. It’s clearly something that comes from a personal place in the hearts of its co-writers, but it leaves you wondering about the actual story or stories that inspired it.
• Atabai is released on 6 May in cinemas.
