Pedar (1996)

director: Majid Majidi

Yesterday morning we watched an Iranian movie, Father (Pedar), directed by Majid Majidi in 1996. Looking around on the net afterwards I was surprised to only find positive and extremely praising reviews, since my experience of the movie was quite the opposite. The story is set in contemporary (I guess) Iran, and the overtly Oedipal plot revolves around 14-year old Mehrollah who goes away to work in order to support his widowed mother and three sisters, only to find her hastily remarried to the local policeman upon his return. Unwilling to accept the new man in his mother’s life as a father, in fact, unwilling to accept a man other than himself in his mother’s life, he unrelentlessly goes about harassing her and the new husband, with male ego outbursts that the director seems to admire as heroic, but that end up being pretty annoying for the spectator who does not have much investment in patriarchy. The storyline doesn`t have much else going for itself, it`s a back and forth between the policeman and Mehrollah`s masculinities, climaxing with the boy managing to steal the policeman`s gun (his gun, get it?) and making a run for it. In the end, quite predictably, the two are brought together by their constant chase and the cheesy ending suggests that Mehrollah will finally be able to accept the policeman as a father figure.
Now, this movie could have been done in a way that is actually meaningful and interesting, given that the theme offers a lot of room for giving depth to the characters and their circumstances. However this movie is made from a normative male perspective, anchoring itself in its biases and conditions uncritically, and presenting them to us as if they were universal values we should understand and sympathize with. Why should I be moved by a deeply patriarchal story in which the crisis is triggered by the absence of the father (an absent presence metaphorically, and literally in the photo that the boy is sporting around) and is solved by finding another male to fill in this position? The character of the mother is completely subdued, she is given very few articulate lines (her token appearances are marked by gasps, cries and tears), and seems to exist only as a pretext for more male existential angst . To be fair, the mother is not presented without a certain degree of condescending compassion, but her gestures and feelings are not conferred with the heroic, tragic dimension that her sons` are. For whom, of course, the challenge is even greater now that she is married to the representative of a very phallic institution, the police, that requires Mehrollah to bring out the big guns of his alpha male kit. In the end, it seems to me that this is movie is a game of whose dick is bigger, an obsession that is apparently not restricted to Western patriarchy.