“His soul had grown larger than life and didn’t fit in his body”. This is how a character in Dariush Mehrjui’s film Pari, describes the suicide of his poet-brother. The brutal murder of Mehruji and his wife a few days ago in Tehran brings this enigmatic comment to mind. He was one Iranian filmmaker whose life and works could never fit into any totalitarian regime or system of thought. Throughout his life, he lived with and through censorship, but always managed to make films that exorcised the darkness around him.
It started with Shah’s regime banning his iconic film The Cow (1969) that inaugurated the Iranian New Wave and continued with all the regimes that followed. He never hesitated to criticise censorship. In 1991, after the hopes raised by the Islamic Revolution had receded, he said, “I realised it was the same old story. Nothing had changed. It is a characteristic of all revolutions: The domination of a single ideology that cannot stand criticism.” In 2022, he was still raging: “Kill me, do whatever you want with me… destroy me, but I want my right”.
Active for over half a century, he was an auteur whose career spans several generations of Iranian cinema. Fascinated by music and painting from his childhood, he joined the University of California to study cinema but soon switched to philosophy. This synergistic enchantment with film and philosophy persisted in his films. He was also the most “European” among Iranian filmmakers. A student of Jean Renoir, he was an admirer of neorealism and one can see visual glimpses of Fellini, Bergman and Bunuel in his films. He adapted western authors like Ibsen, JD Salinger and Karl Buchner, and made a film on Rimbaud (Journey to the Land of Rimbaud). His films abound in philosophical and spiritual musings that range from Avicenna and Hafez to Lao Tse and Kierkegaard, from Sufi thinkers and the Old Testament to Buddha, Krishna and Christ.
Not surprisingly, many of his protagonists are writers, musicians or spiritual seekers: Santouri (2007) is about a santoor player and singer, who struggles with himself, the world and the State; Pari (1995) is about spiritual and artistic seeking; The Pear Tree (1998) has a writer ruefully musing upon his life and work; Hamoun (1989) has a Felliniesque character grappling with reality and philosophical dilemmas. From the ’90s, he made several films that focused on the predicament of women in Iran, probing their yearnings and conflicts — sensual, social and spiritual. Mehrjui experimented with different styles and genres — trenchant social critique (The Cycle), allegory on power (The Postman), comedy (The Lodgers), and fable (The Cow). His were all “adult” films that also dared to celebrate women in all their glory, eccentricities and desires. The ways in which he imagined women — Pari, The Pear Tree, Sara etc. – exude a certain kind of erotic luminosity and spiritual beauty that is rare in the films of his contemporaries. In Pari, unique for its presentation of a woman’s spiritual quest, Mehrjui creates an auratic universe where the mystical play between presence and absence finds a cinematic form. His characters are invested with a graceful urbanity and sophistication
In The Cow, the protagonist Hassan, devastated by the loss of his dear cow, begins to believe he is the cow, an extreme act of empathy. Alarmed and outraged, his friends want to take him to the city for treatment. They plead and coax, but eventually tie him up and drag him through the mud and rain. On the way, frustrated by Hassan’s adamance, Eslan, his close friend, begins to lash him with the rope, just like a cow. That is the moment when the friends suddenly realise how the frenzy of the moment, the oppressive atmosphere, and personal urgency have made them abominably inhuman. This heartbreaking scene provides a glimpse into the diabolic potential that lies deep in the best of humans – a scary thought only a visionary like Dariush Mehrjui could provide.
CS Venkiteswaran is a scholar of cinema and a filmmaker. The views expressed are personal.
