In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
One reason I began this column is to get myself to watch a wider variety of films and learn about directors that are new to me. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say, and while not every new director or new film does it for me, the times that they do makes the risks worthwhile. Bahram Beyzai’s Downpour is one that really resonated with me and it’s also a highly approachable and well-made film that draws heavily on European arthouse conventions. Beyzai is also a director worth knowing—he made only eight feature films but is the rare director who worked in Iran both before and after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and is also a distinguished playwright, film director, and scholar of film and literature.
Downpour opens with a somewhat comical scene of a handcart laden with household goods being dragged through narrow, hilly streets by human power, the first of many light interludes in a film that also deals with some heavy topics. The goods belong to Hekmati (Parviz Fanizadeh; his character is called “Mr. Hekmati” in the subtitles, while other characters don’t have titles), a citified intellectual who has arrived to teach at the local boys’ school. He’s a real fish out of water and doesn’t make a good beginning: his landlady chews him out for what she perceives as rudeness, the driver complains about the remoteness of the location, and the local boys won’t leave his stuff alone. If there are any young female children in this town, they must be hidden away somewherebecause I don’t recall seeing a single girl on screen.
One of those possessions is a large mirror which is soon broken. Chaos ensues as the kids run the cart down a long flight of steps, with his final unloaded possession, a lamp that formerly belonged to his mother, teetering precariously. No surprise that the lamp is soon broken as well, and those possessions were not chosen for their fate at random. According to Beyzai, when you move to a new home in Iran, you must bring three things—a mirror, a lamp, and a book—and the destruction of two of them signals that disruption is coming to his life. The book is also off-kilter, since it is supposed to be religious but Hekmati has only secular books.
Why is so obviously well-educated a man teaching at a school apparently in the back of beyond? Hekmati has had trouble finding a position because he is unmarried, so he had to take what he could get. His lack of a wife is also a plot point, because a big disruption is about to enter his life—he falls in love with the beautiful young woman Atefeh (Parvaneh Massoumi), who is promised to the rich but much less desirable butcher Rahim (Manuchehr Farid). She doesn’t like Rahim, but she’s supporting her aged mother and little brother (one of Hekmati’s students) and can’t do it on the chump change she makes working as a seamstress. So, like Sylvia Sydney’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage, she has to do the one thing she can do to get the money to meet her responsibilities.
Hekmati’s students are pure agents of chaos, as young boys can be—they’re superficially obedient when he’s looking at them, but as soon as he turns his back all manner of hijinks break out and the boys in the cast really get into their roles. They’re certainly nothing like the bookish kid Hekmati probably was, but as he learns to get out of his shell, in part by recognizing his feelings for Atefeh, a sort of mutual understanding is reached between himself and his students and he grows into his classroom role.
The title’s meaning becomes clear in a pivotal scene about two-thirds of the way in, so I’m not going to spoil it, but I will say that it’s beautifully shot and both develops character relationships and moves the plot decisively forward. Cinematographer Barhod Taheri takes full advantage of the fact that this scene occurs during a downpour—the whole film is well shot (and on a tiny budget, using real locations and lots of nonprofessional actors) but this one is particularly good in the same way that film noir scenes set in rainstorms are often especially evocative.
Besides being a masterful film, Downpour is interesting for the views it offers of pre-revolution life in Teheran (it was shot on the city’s outskirts). The society portrayed is patriarchal but not overtly repressive in terms of women’s roles and lacks the severe dress regulations imposed by after the revolution. Nearly everyone wears contemporary European clothing, from suits and ties to turtlenecks and berets for the men and including above-the-knee dresses and slacks for the women. Some women wear a loose shawl or other head covering when outside, but none cover their faces or completely cover their hair, and many uncover their head completely in the presence of men. There are also several women teachers at the school, including an outspoken drama teacher who dresses and acts pretty much as you would expect from a contemporary occupying a similar role in the United States or Western Europe. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 1050
Technical details: 129 min.; B&W; screen ratio 137:1; Persian.
Edition reviewed: DVD (1 disc)
Extras: video introduction by Martin Scorsese, whose World Cinema Project sponsored the restoration of this film; 2020 video interview with director Bahram Beyzaie.
Fun Fact: It’s a wonder we’re even able to watch this film, which was seized by government authorities after the Iranian Revolution and presumably destroyed, along with many other films. The restoration was made from the personal positive copy of the director, which was in rough shape and includes English subtitles burned into the film, which are preserved in this restoration. Given the reported state of the copy, the finished restoration looks pretty good and the soundtrack by Sheyda Gharachedaghi is also in reasonable shape. One issue: the subtitles are incomplete and sometimes lengthy sections of dialogue in Persian are not translated. I wonder why the existing subtitles weren’t supplemented to deal with that issue (maybe that’s not technically possible for some reason?).
Parting Thought: This film’s Persian title, Ragbar, refers to a type of rainstorm that is fierce but short-lived. Is this meant as a metaphor for the romance between Hekmati and Atefeh?
