If one were to cut out the grandiose wedding sequence from the last quarter of Leila’s Brothers (2022) and, with no other information about the film except that available from its poster,…
Tag: Taraneh Alidoosti
Iranian cinema seems to enthuse itself. Even after decades of “New Wave” Iranian films first touching the Western shores, they refuse to wash their hands off their precise domesticity that made their…
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, mused Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. It is so human to lie, to make things up. One does it as a matter of course, even when it is not a regular habit. It’s like a spasm in the monologue that is always running in one’s head, a sudden contraction in the verbiage – done involuntarily, almost like a sneeze. A really amusing example is a scene from 2012’s Moneyball. Brad Pitt asks Jonah Hill whether he did the player evaluation he was supposed to do.
Set against the Persia New Year that features people bursting firecrackers as a part of the Zoroastrian tradition, Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday is about the fireworks that happen inside the flat of a domestically disturbed family of three. Carefully orchestrated with nuanced character moments, the film observes the explosive relationship between a wife and a husband that is embedded with doubt and remorse and doesn’t seem to have a rightful end to it. While not as emotionally complex and downright devastating as the director’s Oscar-winning ‘A Separation’, Fireworks Wednesday is still a brilliantly written domestic drama the shows both the insides and outsides of a marriage on the verge of complete destruction.
Asghar Farhadi has honed a straightforward and simple cinematic language that is both elusively subtle for casual viewers to appreciate the nuances, and at the same time, psychologically complex & morally ambiguous…
The film’s beauty lies in creating characters that are absolutely real, nothing’s exaggerated, even in their moments of madness they retain a sense of humanity, or is it fear? – The film forces you to question the generally accepted morality, is a weak moment of lust worth being stripped of all dignity, or as the film would love be called ” Death of Salesman”?
