Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is known for creating films that combine intimate portraits of ordinary people’s lives with an examination of legal and philosophical ideas. He’s won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film twice—for A Separation (2012) and The Salesman (2017)—and won four awards at Cannes and three at Berlin. While many of his mature films are readily available for home viewing, his earlier films are harder to find, which makes the release of a restored version of his second film, Beautiful City (2004), from Film Movement particularly welcome.
Beautiful City opens in a juvenile detention center, where the friends of a prisoner, Akbar (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) are throwing him a birthday party. It’s a bittersweet occasion, however, because Akbar has just turned 18, which means he is legally an adult and will be transferred to an adult prison. More significantly, it means that he can now be executed for a crime he committed at age 16, the murder of a young women with whom he was in love.
Despite the heinous nature of that crime, Akbar has his supporters. Chief among them is his friend and fellow inmate Ala (Babak Ansari), a thief who is paroled early by a sympathetic prison official (Farhad Ghaemian) who sees the good in this young man, despite his crimes. The early release is also intended to allow Ala to try to save Akbar’s life by convincing the father of the murdered woman to forgive the killer and ask for clemency on his behalf, in which case he would serve a life sentence rather than being executed. Ala is joined in this effort by Firoozeh (Taraneh Alidoosti), Akbar’s sister, a young divorced woman with a child who lives with her parents and handicapped half-sister.
You may wonder why one private individual would have, essentially, the right of life and death over another, but that’s how Iranian law works in the case of a murder conviction. It does make some sense and may even be superior to our more clinical and removed approach to criminal justice. The Iranian system underlines the very personal nature of the loss caused by someone’s murder while at the same time calling on the bereaved person to examine their conscience and try to see the humanity in the person of the killer. For the family and friends of the murdered, the process of seeking clemency requires them to witness and acknowledge the grief caused by the murder and to humble themselves before the victim’s family.
Ala and Firoozeh work diligently to try to get the father, Abolqasem (Faramarz Gharibian), to forgive Akbar. It’s a tough job, though, because Abolqasem is (understandably) consumed with grief for his daughter and grows impatient with the repeated entreaties of Ala and Firoozeh. His wife (Abu Kheradmand) is more sympathetic to the cause of clemency, and a clergyman (Mehran Mahram) urges Abolqasem to find forgiveness in his heart, but the clock is ticking as Akbar’s execution date nears.
There’s another complication, since Iranian law recognizes the concept of “blood money” (financial compensation for another’s death), but values the life of a woman at only half that of a man. So if Abolqasem insists on Akbar’s execution, he must make up the difference, and that’s money that could otherwise be used for an operation needed by his stepdaughter. On the other hand, if Ala and Firoozeh can raise the blood money for the murdered woman’s death, in return for Abolqasem forgiving Akbar, that money could be used to pay for the operation. Some Western societies used to recognize the concept of blood money, and there’s merit in the concept—it forces the murderer’s family to recognize the wrong committed, directly helps the victim’s family, provides some closure for both sides, and forestalls what could be an endless cycle of revenge.
Beautiful City is not a perfect film—some of the plot complications are contrived, and some of the characters’ action derived seem to stem from narrative necessity alone—but it’s a very interesting film that provides a glimpse at the early years of a filmmaker today acknowledged as a master of his craft. | Sarah Boslaugh
Beautiful City is available on VOD from Film Movement beginning Oct. 13.
