On MotherJones.com, Shane Bauer writes up his experience watching Rosewater, the new film directed by Jon Stewart, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Bauer says Stewart gets so much of what Ben Affleck’s Argo got wrong about Iranians and that Stewart’s film eerily mirrored reality:
There is something incredible about watching someone on screen go through the precise moments that you, too, have experienced, like the transcendental feeling of reaching your hand into a beam of sunlight coming over the wall the first time you go outside. When Bahari was allowed to call his wife, I teared up, knowing the rare mixture of relief and freedom he felt when he heard the voice of his beloved, who was doing everything she could to get him out. (Sarah was released a year before I was.) I laughed with Bahari as he danced in his cell after the phone call—far and away the most powerful scene of the film—oblivious to his interrogator’s fury. As the months went by, Bahari combed through his memories like old books. He found what songs he knew and listened to them in his head. Family members imprisoned by the current and former regimes became his imaginary company.
New Jersey is “a godless place, like the one you were trying to create in this country,” the interrogator says. “With naked women and Michael Jackson music!”
Unlike me, Bahari was beaten by his interrogator. I would expect an American film about Iranian imprisonment to exaggerate such violence, but Rosewater actually downplays it. “Beatings were the exception,” Stewart told an interviewer at the screening. “Solitary confinement was the rule.” He also wanted to help people understand what it’s like to be placed in isolation. “We do this in this country.” Stewart said. “We keep people in solitary, and it’s insanity!”The film expertly captures the banality—and absurdity—of the interrogations—perfect fodder for Stewart’s sense of dark comedy. Bahari’s interrogator is obsessed with porn, and he views New Jersey (Stewart’s home state) as a den of iniquity. “All I know is it’s a godless place, like the one you were trying to create in this country,” he said. “With naked women and Michael Jackson music!”
The interrogator is sure he has cracked his case when he comes across a Daily Show clip in which “senior foreign correspondent” Jason Jones, clad in a chafiye scarf and sunglasses, interviews Bahari in a Tehran café. In the clip, Jones plays the aggro American journalist trying to expose what makes Iranians “evil.” “Iranians and Americans have much more in common than difference,” Bahari replies. The clueless interrogator takes the whole thing literally, accusing Bahari of meeting with an American spy: “Why did you tell this man Iran and America have something in common? Khomeini said America was the Great Satan. We threw them out the door and you bring them back through the window.”
What sets Rosewater apart is that it depicts most Iranians as people we can relate to—something American films, as a rule, fail to do. Ben Afleck’s Academy Award winning Argo has exactly one likeable Iranian character; the rest are menacing and often appear in mobs. Rosewater’s depiction of Iran is closer to reality: a complex society divided between socially conservative and liberal. People have parties. Some drink. They dream about a better future rather than an idealized past.
Toward the end of the film, Stewart captures the twisted game of the forced confession. Under threat, Bahari went on Iranian television and said that Western media, in particular Newsweek, CNN, and the New York Times, had helped create Irans post-election uprising. “Everyone watching these confessions knows they are a show,” Stewart saidin the post-screening chat. “There is a uselessness to them. A daily grind.” To him, the confessions epitomize the “bureaucracy of torture” that perpetuates itself without reason.
Rosewater is a film everyone should see, whether the critics anointed it or not. Full story here.
Agreed with Kane. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about Argo and studying Iranian history and Persian language as an undergrad, and while the movie has a lot of problems, it wouldn’t be fair to say it didn’t have its nuance. A huge part of the movie was the fact that America was so out of touch with Iran — and I thought this was shown brilliantly a huge number of ways, from the intelligence guys suggesting using pictures of sub-saharan African kids as a cover for an “aid” mission, to all the Iranians trying to get into the U.S., to the maid Sahar, to the guards who were struck by the Star-Wars spinoff, to especially what was happening inside the United States, what with all the yellow ribbons and the footage of Iranians being beat up in America … and the interrogation scene when Affleck shows up to the Minister of Culture and he straight up tells Affleck, “oh you’re shooting another Oriental POS with magic carpets and whatever … fine good luck.” The movie had its profound moments, whether or not you accept them, that is a different story. I thought the film also did a good job of showing why the mob-violence was so justified (even if the hostage taking WASN’T, and that I – and MANY Iranians, than as now – agree with) … it’s not like Affleck was a typical gun-totting ‘Murcan hero either, his own portrayal was obviously conflicted and nuanced. As far as its treatment of Middle-Easterners goes, I thought it was more nuanced than Zero Dark Thirty that year, which surprised me as I thought that the way Hurt Locker tackled these issues was even more brilliant.
I’m not always the biggest Argo defender but there were a few decent Iranians in the film. I’d say, near the end, the maid and the tour guide for the film crew. The mobs on the streets were in response to Carter giving asylum to Shah. It was during the Iranian Revolution. There were a lot of people up in arms and very pissed off. Iranians at he bazaar were generally going about their day until one of the Americans took a picture of one Iranian and his booth, which he took offense to. Oh, there were Iranians inside the US embassy that were non-violent and essentially fearing for their lives just for being there. One Iranian was taken out back behind his home and gunned down. The mob outside the embassy? That was recreated from real footage. So with he beginning I salute Affleck for sticking to the truth with the opening scenes. I can just as easily point out what Argo got wrong but to say all Iranians in the film look menacing. “The rest often appear in mobs” well yeah. It was during a revolution. And since so much of the events in Iran were told from the point of view of the American hostages and Taylor’s family it was either see a few mobs when the hostages walked outside or see their time in a basement and a dining room. If somebody is going to call out a film they better believe people, like me, will take their words literally.