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.

a disturbing case from Moldova

The tabloid never sleeps. In Moldova, Boris Ungureanu was shot by his father, the mayor from Hancesti. With a shotgun. One shot. Deadly. The father protects himself by saying that there was a weird connection between son and mother. She was giving him a lot of cash for dirty purposes. He couldn't take it anymore. What looks like a simple boring everyday situation hides much more... This case, presented by Chisinau Journal, is quite interesting for raising some important questions: How does a father reacts in a case of reversed Oedipal Complex, like this one? How does hysterical symptoms, especially those connected to strong sibling relations that I identify here between mother and father, affect children? And I am talking about children of hysterics. Can we launch the hypothesis that they take at some point the role of parents, due to age difference, that can work in a reversed way? And that is highly disturbing for a parent with authority: to become his own child’s child. But the way out exists. This guy found the most unfortunate version of it.