Behind the Candelabra & Fifi Howls from Happiness

Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh – USA) 118 minutes

Fifi Howls from Happiness (Fifi az khoshhali zooze mikeshad) (Mitra Farahani – USA/Iran/France) 96 minutes

The first I heard of Liberace was the day he died, when I was eleven years old. Within twenty-four hours I knew he was gay and had died of AIDS. And so crumbled the façade he had so assiduously maintained. The star entertainer had successfully cowed media speculation about his sexuality (though, curiously, he only felt the need to resort to suing in the less libel-friendly UK) and many of his fans were none the wiser as to the fact. Almost immediately though his homosexuality became one of the dominant things about his personality among the wider public (to be fair to the man, the attempts to out him were never motivated by emancipatory intent, so you can’t really blame him for hiding it). Another immediate effect of his death was he began to be forgotten. Liberace’s fame relied upon his presence on stage in Las Vegas and on TV holiday specials. He may have produced over forty LPs but not a single one of them lives on as testament to his fame.

Upon hearing Steven Soderbergh was to finish his filmmaking career with a Liberace biopic, I thought ‘oh yeah, Liberace, remember him.’ Like Michael Winterbottom’s recent Paul Raymond film The Look of Love, Behind the Candelabra feels like it has come a couple of decades too late. Soderbergh made the film for HBO – it has been released in cinemas internationally after premiering at Cannes – and, despite suggestions that the studios weren’t prepared to handle such a high-profile gay story, you sense they steered clear of it more because it is about the, well, forgotten Liberace. Besides, though the film is perfectly cinematic, its home is definitely on the small screen.

Behind the Candelabra is based on the memoir of Scott Thorson, Liberace’s former lover, who lived with him for several years in the late 70s and early 80s, before the pianist kicked him out as his drug problem got out of hand. Thorson (Matt Damon) is introduced to Liberace (Michael Douglas) while working as a young animal wrangler (though the film does not have him as young as he supposedly was in real life at the time – 16) and is quickly taken in, working as a chauffeur and assistant to give him something to do. Liberace seems to see more in him than in his other beaux and bizarrely suggests adopting Scott – though this may have been a publicity ploy, given that many of Liberace’s housewife fans came to assume that was their relationship. The strangeness of the demand is compounded by the plastic surgery and general make-over Scott is put through to make him resemble the older man. This backfires however when the surgeon – a wonderfully sleazy Rob Lowe in one of the film’s many casting coups – gets Scott hooked on pills as part of his ‘California diet’. The drug dependent downfall that follows is familiar from many West Coast films set in the era.

Michael Douglas won an Emmy for his portrayal of Liberace and it is hard to argue with that; if the film were eligible for the Oscars he would surely be the hot favourite for Best Actor too. Douglas inhabits Liberace effortlessly, and pulls off a performance that might have proved disastrous with the slightest false move. His Liberace has a clear sense of his impending obsolescence – a failure as a concert pianist, he reinvented himself as a hugely successful entertainer but he cannot even prevent his own brother, who plays under the same name, from chipping away at his fame. He tells Scott that he is so old he remembers the ladies playing the Wurlitzers at movie theatres; he is part of a dying world and his lawyer’s last desperate attempts to alter his death certificate to hide his cause of death are the last hurrah. Damon is quietly effective as Thorson, a man whose drug habits have never gone away – he is currently in prison for parole violation – though his performance is more biopic standard.

 Soberbergh’s direction is smooth and slick and the film whips along at a good pace, but as ever with his films there is something clinical about Behind the Candelabra and you miss the sense of ill-manneredness that might have tipped it into the realm of genius. Still, he had the inspired idea of casting Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother, providing a living link with the era that made the man huge. You imagine that, had he not succumbed to AIDS, Liberace might have enjoyed a resurgent fame in the 90s. He would probably have been able to come out of the closet and with both his camp sensibility and the faux-sophistication of the swing era coming back into fashion, he’d have been an even bigger draw than ever. As it stands, Behind the Candelabra is a curiosity, a slice of 20th century ephemera that catches momentarily a time when popular culture thrived on a necessary innocence.







Mitra Farahani’s documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness is another portrait of a gay artist in his final days. The subject is the late Iranian painter and sculptor, Bahman Mohasses, who died in 2010. Farahani, who previously directed a fascinating 2004 documentary, Taboos, on sexual attitudes in Iran, tracked Mohasses down to his hotel suite in Rome, where he has lived in exile for much of the past sixty years. Long out of Iran and his works within the country having been destroyed following the Islamic revolution, Mohasses is sufficiently forgotten by many to be considered a cult figure. Early on, we see wealthy young Iranian diaspora collectors waxing lyrical about his work, in which the influences of Ernst, Magritte and Bacon can be discerned.

    Mohasses himself is an engaging, provocative interviewee. He perorates in a semi-reactionary way, being scornful of gay marriage, reproaching the gay rights movement for ‘taking the illicit pleasure’ out of sex – he also claims that he never cruised gay men, but always young Italian guys who had girlfriends. He is also misogynistic, remarking upon the ‘bitch face’ of the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani (no relation to the director) on a magazine cover. However contentious he might be though, his gregarious bronchial cackle and his gleeful wit make his every moment on screen compellingly watchable. At one point he mocks the director, saying that in the old Soviet Union, she would have got a medal pinned to her chest by Zhdanov for services to Socialist Realism (Mohasses studied art in Moscow at the very time that Zhdanov was overseeing Stalinist aesthetics).

    Farahani’s ‘services to Socialist Realism’ certainly don’t preclude her from playing the international art market, as part of the deal for Mohasses agreeing to do the film is her finding him a commission worth €100,000. Most collectors she calls baulk at the price, saying nothing has been heard of him since the Revolution, but two young Dubai-based brothers are enthusiastic and fly to Rome to meet Mohasses, who immediately plays hardball, demanding 70% payment up front. The episode is framed by Farahani, in voiceover, in reference to the meeting of the young Nicolas Poussin with the older painter Frenhofer in Balzac’s short story ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’. This formal self-consciousness shifts Farahani’s film more into film-essay territory, as do the extracts from Visconti’s The Leopard, a favourite film of Mohasses, and an explicit end-of-an-era reference.

    The film ends with Mohasses’ death, though it is not clear if the scene where he shouts in distress, off camera, is that very moment. It is one of the few instances of uncomfortable voyeurism in the film, and reminds you a little of the ailing Nicholas Ray in Wim Wenders’ Nick’s Movie. The painting is unfinished, and instead the young commissioners get to take a selection of the artist’s works he has offered as guarantee. Mohasses’ niece oversees the packing away of the works, including the one which gives the film its title, a sunnier version of Munch’s ‘The Scream’ and which was the painter’s own favourite of his works. As the movers wrap the tableaux up and slide them into crates, you have the sense of the great art movements of the twentieth century being put to rest, of abstract canvases finally yielding to conceptualism and gimmickry. Mohasses was already someone who had the stamp of yesteryear about him, a man thoroughly imbued with the hope and certainties of the post-war art boom, now largely forgotten. This fine documentary will hopefully go some of the way towards keeping his memory alive, both in his native country and abroad.

Something to Be Said About Real Journalism

More on Twitter, Iran, old and new media. Roger Cohen has done some great reporting from Iran in the past year, and incurred the wrath of right-wing Zionists such as Jonah Goldberg for suggesting that the country, and perhaps even its government, is not awash with anti-semitism. Here he elaborates on a previous column, written shortly after he was forced to leave Iran during the post-election protests. In that piece, he noted the limitations of tweeting, blogging and citizen journalism, and stirred a wave of irrational indignation from the likes of Ariana Huffington. Cohen, like David Simon, is not contemptuous of the capabilities of new media nor the endeavour of those that use them. But he correctly points out that amateurs, no matter how diligent and knowledgeable can only do so much; to 'bear witness' as he says, takes, time, money and the ability to be on site. Huffington might be correct to say that it's possible to miss a lot whilst there, either willingly or otherwise. And I would agree with anyone that says 'Old Journalism' counts among its ranks tens of thousands of charlatans, hypocrites and armchair thugs who, in a well-run world would be flipping burgers. But this doesn't validate Huffington's point about the likes of her, me or anyone pontificating from their keyboards thousands of miles from the action. Real journalism, Cohen continues,

comes into being only through an organizing intelligence, an organizing sensibility. It depends on form, an unfashionable little word, without which significance is lost to chaos. As Aristotle suggested more than two millennia ago, form requires a beginning and middle and end. It demands unity of theme. Journalism cuts through the atwitter state to thematic coherence.

In the making of the choices I have described, presence is required. Because part of the choice lies in something ineffable — the air you breathe, the sounds you hear, the shadow light as a bird’s wing that falls across fearful eyes — something that cannot be seized or rendered at a distance.

Technology has enriched journalism by expanding the means to deliver it and the raw material on which it is based. But technology has also diminished the incentive — and the revenue — to get out of the office. Understanding without the trained “view from the ground” (Martha Gellhorn) remains impossible. Nature abhors a vacuum, journalism even more so, and so it fills absence with windiness.

It's enough to forgive Roger Cohen the snide, condescending attitude he took towards the French in endorsing Nicolas Sarkozy's candidature using a 'tough love' rationale in the 2007 Presidential election.

Op-Ed Columnist - New Tweets, Old Needs - NYTimes.com

Twits for Peace

Something from last weekend. An opinion piece, written by a former US national security advisor, in the normally lucid and admirable Christian Science Monitor that calls for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, really. Iran is the main reason cited, given the widespread use of Twitter by pro-democracy activists in the post-election protests. The CSM even gets a bit emotive on it, indulging in foamy rhetoric last seen in Stanley Kramer's heyday:

Without Twitter, the world might have known little more than a losing candidate accusing the powers that be of alleged fraud. Without Twitter, the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy. They did so because they knew the world was watching. With Twitter, they now shout hope with a passion and dedication that resonates not just with those on their street, but with millions across the globe.

My word, what utter nonsense. Those that know me know I'm not behind the door when it comes to tweeting and I have no intention of joining the chorus of jobbing journos who see imminent social decay in people's micro-blogging. But let's keep things in perspective. Twitter was a useful tool for Iranian protestors to disseminate images to the world, not least images of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, though it is questionable how useful it was for organising protests given that Iran had a relatively small number of Twitter users and given how easily traceable users are on it. And there is of course the fact that many decoy feeds were set up by Iranian authorities. Evgeny Morozov is a great deal more sensible about this and internet activism and security are his domain, knowing a thing or two about repressive regimes (he's of Belarussian nationality). He cautions against a 'cyber-utopianism' which imagines that web applications such as Twitter can be used to bring down authoritarian regimes.

Iran's protests would have happened without Twitter; to suggest otherwise is to insult both the bravery and the sophistication of those that organised and participated in them. It's an absurdly solipsistic view of westerners to imagine that the mass protest against a thirty-year-old theocracy might be suddenly given fresh impetus by a tool that most of us use for diversion. If Twitter should get the Nobel peace prize, why not give it to the printing press, the telephone, the human voice? Has the world really run out of humans striving for peace and justice that we must reward a web application conceived with little other than instant messaging in mind?

There is also a disturbing vertically-integrated culture of heroes and villains in this 'Twitter revolution theory', it's all plucky secular Iranians against the Mullahs, plucky little Georgia against the big bad Russian bear, the plucky Venezuelan bourgeoisie against Hugo Chávez. And Morozov is guilty of this himself, in his analysis of the 'Moldovan Twitter revolution'. Moldova, earlier this year, was the first instance of Twitter being used to organise and publicise protests. But what few people mention is the fact that the protests were against an election victory in polls judged free and fair by observers. While I can understand the frustration of Moldovan youth who bristle at living under a democratically-elected communist government (I have liked few of the governments I myself have lived under) the moral force of the protests was not persuasive. And, among people in the west, there's a rather strange assumption that people who use Twitter for political ends must be on the side of the angels. A quick look at a few Twitter feeds will convince otherwise. A little bit of perspective on Twitter would be welcome. It's safe to say that many authoritarian regimes and protests against them will long outlast micro-blogging as we know it.

Iran v Israel (but not in the football)

My movie-going has been suffering because the football's been so good I'm afraid to miss any of it, but I have managed to live off my memories to pen an article over on Irish Left Review comparing Iranian and Israeli cinema (well, somebody had to do it). Having just seen Mario Gomez try to lob the Austrian keeper from three feet to provide surely the most comical miss in a major championship since the heyday of Stéphane Guivarc'h (he won a World Cup medal, you know), I'm going back to the football. Even the Teutons are providing high drama.

Persepolis: Sometimes Things Are Black and White

I have written quite a bit on this blog about Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, both the four-volume comic book that has been a huge international success, chalking up over one-and-a-half-million sales, and the animated film version which she has herself directed, together with fellow comics artists Vincent Paronnaud. The film has just been released and I was pleased to see that it is more than a simple slavish adaptation of the book.

For those unfamiliar with the book, Persepolis is the autobiographical tale of Satrapi growing up at the time of the Iranian revolution, in a communist family that also had royal heritage. As for many liberal, left-wing Iranians, the Satrapis saw their initial joy at the overthrow of the Shah quickly evaporate with the rise to power of the Mullahs, who foisted a viciously demented totalitarianism culled from the Dark Ages on a country that already had one foot in the modern age. Satrapi's uncle, an activist with Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party, who had already been imprisoned and tortured under the Shah saw his complaisance at the coming to power of the Islamists rewarded with first imprisonment and then execution.

There then follows the Iran-Iraq war, waged by two squalidly despotic regimes, in which one million people needlessly perished. The war is refracted through tales of Marjane's childhood friends coming from back from the front forever altered and the deaths of neighbours in Iraqi airstrikes. When the feisty teenage Marjane begins to question her teachers' indoctrination too loudly, her parents send her off to the French Lycée in Vienna for her own safety, a wise move considering how the Islamists had few qualms about executing dissident schoolchildren, taking the trouble to rape them so as to circumvent the Koranic prohibition on subjecting virgins to capital punishment.

In Vienna, in the 1980s she encounters Europeans with dismayingly one-dimensional views of her country and following a number of fallings-out with people she ends up sleeping rough and almost dying, something which her own parents never found out until the publication of volume three of he comic. She returns to Iran to brave a country where ordinary people are forever at the mercy of the dour, viciously puritanical Moral Police. After a failed marriage she decides to move to France, where she still lives, her international success having made a return to Tehran impossible while the current regime remains in power.

Part of the success of Satrapi's work is the simple, almost child-like line of her two-tone drawings, which feature clunky, cartoonish people, which she herself claims is a result of being forced to draw life studies in art school in Tehran of models absurdly draped in full-length chadors (something which is alluded to in one scene in the film). The film elaborates on this style, introducing more shade for the sequences depicting the revolution and the subsequent war. The model Satrapi and Paronnaud followed was German expression, which is suitable on a poltical as well as aesthetic level, considering how many of the UFA filmmakers had to flee on the Nazis' assumption of power. They also based the family sequences on Italian neo-realism, which carry a recognisable stamp of Rosselini, de Sica and early Visconti, and offer an equally brilliant condensing of the political climate of the time. Both Satrapi's parents (voiced by Simon Abkarian and Catherine Deneuve) are admirable characters but the real scene-stealer is the outspoken, opium-smoking grandmother with the voice of veteran French actress Danielle Daressieu.

Marjane herself is played by Deneuve's real-life daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and she is the same ballsy, likeable and occasionally infuriating woman and girl that appears in the comic. The film is often funny, rarely passing up an opportunity to ridicule the lethal God-fearing nonsense of the Mullahs but many of the scenes are also devastating, from the very beginning, when the adult Marjane puts on her chador at Orly airport (instantly attracting derision from a French bystander) in order to board a flight home. Satrapi never allows us to lose sight of the tragedy of the revolution that was betrayed and crushed by a crowd of fundamentalist madmen, yet there is also a complete lack of the sentimentalism that often mars such accounts of exile. Persepolis the film, like the comic that preceeded it, is a moving, indispensable portrait of a country with a formidable civilisation that has lived a nightmarish existence for the past fifty years, and it is a fitting companion piece to the courageous work of Jafar Panahi, among others, in offering a view of Iran that will challenge the preconceptions of many in the West.

It looks like being huge too, if the queues that prevented me from seeing it on its opening day are anything to go by. It is due to released later in the year in an English-language version (it is produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall - Spielberg's regular producers) and should be guaranteed large audiences. Not to be missed.

Cannes Do

I had planned to post on the Cannes Film Festival earlier on but an overloaded hard-drive took its toll on the speed at which I was able to type what was turning out to be a lengthy post. Having cleared up a huge amount of space by getting rid of back-ups that I already had elsewhere, I'm back on the case. However by now the results are known. A film that had been tipped by many to win took the Palme d'Or, it was 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu's bleak drama about backstreet abortions in Ceaucescu's Romania. After the honours bestowed on Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, this is the third year in a row that Romanian films have taken a major Cannes prize. Considering that the country's cinema was scarcely known in Western Europe until a couple of years ago and also considering the relative poverty of the country, this development is nothing short of amazing. It is a film I look forward to seeing when it gets released here.

Painter-cum-filmmaker Julian Schnabel took the Best Director prize for his moving adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir Le Scaphandre et le papillon, which I saw on Friday night. And Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis, which I have written about on a number of occasions on this blog, shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light. Here's a taster of the film, which is being released over here next month. It's in French but it's going to be released in an English-language version too. Looks good. And it pisses off the fools running the Islamic Republic too. More on Cannes tomorrow.

Marjane Satrapi and the Cartoon Characters That Run Iran

I'll write more on the Cannes Film Festival later in the week (though as I am not down there, there won't be a great deal to write about) but here's a brief note about the Iranian government protesting at the presence of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis in competition: the Mullahs bleat that the film gives 'an unreal presentation of the consequences and successes of the Islamic Revolution'. Those leftists and nationalists that perished in the Islamist reign of terror in the years following the Revolution that they themselves helped bring about would beg to differ.

Tehran also claims that the festival is committing an 'anti-cultural' and politically-motivated act in showing the film, which is laughable given the Iranian Islamists' blanket censorship of thousands of films, including many of those by Iran's finest filmmakers. Thankfully Iran is not as influential as China and able to bully distributors and festivals abroad into deselecting dissident films, and what Tehran really fears is the more positive attitude towards ordinary Iranians and Iranian culture that the film will foster, thereby removing the country's bogeyman status, in turn depriving them of their own raison d'être. That Satrapi, being a good Persian leftist, has no time for Bush and the Washington neocons' plans to bomb her homeland is, of course, irrelevant to them.

Another Side of Iranian Society

I wrote last year about a piece in the New York Times on growing up as a Jew in Iran, and the Christian Science Monitor has a great article today on the Islamic Republic's small but ancient Jewish community. Now numbering 25,000 but guaranteed civic and religious freedoms that might come as a surprise to those that see Iran only as the fulcrum of the Axis of Evil, the community sees no contradiction between their religion and their nationality. Recently-deposed Israeli president Moshe Katsav is a native of Isfahan, and there is one Jewish member of the Iranian Assembly. It might be pointed out that there are also many Iranian Muslims that have no truck with the decrepit theocracy that reigns in the country. President Ahmadinejad is, of course, a nasty piece of work and he doesn't stint on the anti-semitism but Iran is a complex country where constituencies overlap - a large sector of the Shia clergy is liberal and pro-reform - and the country, for all its faults, has a remarkable culture and civic society that towers over the wretched pro-West dictatorships of the Arabian peninsula. There are many in the West, like John McCain that think that a bombing of Iran might sort its problems out for good, but as Ciamak Moresadegh, the Chairman of the Tehran Jewish Committee points out, 'if a war were to start, we would also be a target. When a missile lands, it does not ask if you are a Muslim or a Jew. It lands.'

The Christian Science Monitor is a paper that is not very well known outside the US and its excellent online edition and RSS feeds are well worth bookmarking as it is one of the few genuinely independent American news sources.

John McCain's Sing-Song

On the subject of Iran, here is US Presidential hopeful John McCain's joking views on what the White House should do to it. Charming stuff, and this is the liberal wing of the Republican Party.

Iranians Get Animated

I mentioned last year the film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's brilliant comic book Persepolis ('graphic novel' is a superfluous and pretentious term that I refuse to use for works by Satrapi and other great comic book artists). The film is now going to be premiered next month at Cannes and its French-language version will be released on the 27th of June. In the French version Satrapi and her mother will be played by real-life mother and daughter Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni with Simon Abkarian as her father and veteran actress Danielle Darrieusecq as the grandmother. Satrapi and her co-director, fellow artist Vincent Paronnaud aka Winschluss have set up a MySpace page for the film, on which there is a running series of Making of... films, which are interesting though not terribly useful to those that don't speak French. From the stills alone it appears that the book's unique visual style has been preserved, and by the look of certain plates redolent of German Expressionist cinema, even improved upon. I can't wait to see it and with its English-language version starring Mastroianni also, with Gena Rowlands replacing Deneuve, hopefully it will be a huge international success, giving Westerners a more balanced view of Iran than what has been displayed by Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the country's Western detractors recently.

Humiliated?

The Stations of the Cross kept me from here yesterday, and the day also passed without a US attack on Iran, as had been suggested by some sources last week. No mea culpa from Seanachie, I never exactly said that I thought it was going to happen. Well, the British prisoners returned from Iran (unlike the British media, I don't think journalistic impartiality would permit them to be called 'hostages') and they are telling all about their ordeal, which included being blindfolded and being subjected to the sound of guns being cocked around them. I am given to a certain degree of scepticism here as the prepared statements no doubt have Whitehall's imprimatur on them, and I trust the Blair government no more than I trust the current administration in Teheran (and I will make no apologies to anyone for such 'moral fudging'). And, in the latest, hilarious twist to the story, Teheran has accused the British of dictating the sailors' testimony. But, as I said earlier this week, I would not like to be held prisoner by the Revolutionary Guard and the reported treatment is not entirely incredible.

What is particularly repulsive is the treatment of the released detainees by the armchair generals of the British media: 'the seized personnel lost no time in admitting to having trespassed and in apologising for their mistake. The old military practice of giving name, rank and number, and no more, has obviously been abandoned,' muttered the Daily Telegraph, sore at Britain having been 'humiliated'. While it is true that Blair handled the crisis in an atrocious way and played right into Ahmadinejad's hands, it is only those moronic old Imperial nostalgists such as the Torygraph and Geoffrey Wheatcroft (a man who questions the right of the Irish to commemorate the 1916 Rising) that will feel the sharp pang of humiliation.

Iran: Any Link Between Two Stories?

The Iran prisoner's crisis continues apace, with the British breaking off all ties with the Islamic Republic while the Iranians appear content to call their bluff with each carefully calibrated release of yet another confession. While displaying captured military personnel on TV is clearly in breach of the Geneva Conventions, and I would not be too keen to be in the custody of the People's Revolutionary Guards - even in the full glare of the world looking on - there is something discordant in the outrage being expressed by Downing Street over the detention and treatment of the fifteen sailors. Both Terry Jones and Ronan Bennett have pointed out in The Guardian the apparent softness of the Iranian handling of their prisoners compared with the Coalition of the Willing's at Camp X=Ray and Abu Ghraib, while Bob Fisk over at the Indy has a lucid, and by no means complaisant analysis of Teheran's brinksmanship.

Meanwhile there is almost unanimous lack of interest in the story that was posted here last week (and also in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday) about a putative US missile attack on Iran on Good Friday. While the hits have been flowing into Underachievement headquarters (and quickly, out again, it must be said) in a way that has never happened before and is unlikely to again, over at the Post's message boards, many believe that it is a sick April Fool's joke. It has however been in the ether for at least a week though and it went up here last Wednesday. Which is not to say that it guaranteed true either. But if this is the case, what is it that interests Israel's premier English-language newspaper more than any other mainstream media source (including Al-Jazeera, it must be remembered)? And is the current Iranian prisoners episode only a charade to serve as a preamble to an attack on Friday?

Seanachie and the Jerusalem Post: United for Once!

Never before has an Underachievement post attracted so much attention: my ephemeral piece the other day about the planned US attack on Iran on Good Friday (next Friday, to all you fellow a-Christians) has been chanced upon by a number of readers who have got wind of the same thing. So far there have been no Western media willing to run with this story, except one. Earlier on today a friend of mine, who is a journalist with extensive experience in the middle east pointed this out to me and the online search bears this out also. It is only the Jerusalem Post that has carried this as a story thus far; while knowing that April Fool's Day has just passed, I wouldn't expect the Israelis (particularly the Jerusalem Post) to be so wacky as to use it to break such news. So, one must ask how a story that has been mooted (however speculatively) by Seanachie and the right-wing Israeli media, could go so unnoticed by the media in Europe and North America? I hope I am wrong about the Good Friday bombings but I am beginning to think otherwise.

US to Attack Iran on Good Friday?

A link just sent to me by a friend back home: according to retired Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, the US intends to bomb Iran in early April, on the 6th - Good Friday - to be precise. It is also expected that Congress will not be consulted on the attack due to pressure - according to Novosti, the Russian News and Information Society - from AIPAC, the US lobbying group for the Israeli far-right. The links are in French; there are English-language pages on the Novosti website but I haven't been able to find the stories in question there.

Persian The Thought

Seanachie is a big fan of Iranian culture, or at least that small part of it with which he is acquainted, such as the films of Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmahlbaf, Abol-Fazl Jalili and Jafar Panahi; the poetry of Furough Farrokhzad and Ahmad Shamlou, and the excellent comic-book work of Marjane Satrapi. The latter in particular has been instrumental in increasing awareness among Westerners of the country that goes beyond the familiar clichés of crazed fundamentalist ayatollahs and defiant anti-Western rhetoric. What has been most remarkable about the Iranian diaspora over the past twenty years, spread as it is around the Middle East, North America, France and Britain, is both its success in business, academe and other fields but also its resolute opposition to the Islamic regime back home. And that opposition is mirrored in many sectors back in Iran, where it is a good deal trickier, to be measured almost week-by-week against variations in the political climate.

Now, however one thing has succeeded in uniting both the Islamic establishment in Iran and the more liberal diaspora: the new film 300, due to be released in Europe next week, which tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae fought in 480BC by the Spartans against the Persians, led by the celebrated Xerxes. The Iranians on both sides complain of historical inaccuracies and misrepresentation of ancient Persian culture, while the Iranian government condemn an 'act of terror' directed at them by the West. While there may be be an undercurrent of historical bias in the fiction based on a comic book by Sin City creator Frank Miller, I doubt that most people involved in the film even considered that the ancient Persians had any relation to modern Iran. To view the film as an piece of Imperialist propaganda is misguided, to say the least. But one can understand the frustration of Iranians, who, as well as seeing their country and culture constantly smeared by ignorant Westerners (and disgraced by the madmen in control in Teheran), should also see their ancient civilization unrecognised. Even if disputing the facts of a battle that took place two and a half millenia ago is a bit sensitive. My favourite act of dissension by Iranian bloggers is the 'Google-bombing' devised by Canadian-based Pendar Yousefi, which plans to divert Google searches about the film to websites that offer other perspectives on Persian culture and art. Enlightening even a hundred lazy Westerners will be a job well done. The Iranians will get redress of sorts with the release later this year of the film adaptation of Satrapi's Persepolis, which from the film stills alone looks like it is going to be great.

Miles Offside

The Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi started off life in film as assistant director to the magisterial Abbas Kiarostami, an apprenticeship he achieved as a result of reading John Baxter's biography of Luis Bunuel, and being inspired to write to Kiarostami and ask for a job, just as Bunuel did in his youth. As cutting one's teeth in cinema go, it doesn't get better than that and Panahi has not squandered what he has learned. His debut film The White Balloon, a beautifully subtle children's film set on Iranian New Year's Eve won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 1994 and since then he has won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2000 for The Circle and also made Crimson Gold, two films which are among the greatest made anywhere in the world so far this decade. Panahi studied closely Kiarostami's method of filming and mounting fiction among a reality so fluid, shifting and uncertain that one never knows where the film might end up, forever being at the mercy of the vicissitudes of Iranian power changes, between judiciary and legislature, a quality that, as I have noted elsewhere before, is not too different from the 'Great Satan', the US.

Panahi's new film Offside focuses on the efforts of women, mainly working class Teheranis, to watch the decisive Iran-Bahrein World Cup qualifier of last October, in defiance of a law forbidding their presence, for the typically insane reason of 'defending their honour'. As in The Circle, which treated of the efforts of Iranian prostitutes and other 'loose livers' to evade the moral police, Panahi is courageously on the side of the fairer sex, and in this case his film was successful enough to persuade head head-the-ball Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to change the law and allow women into the stadiums. The film starts, as ever with Pahani, in media res, on a bus carrying football fans out to the stadium on the outskirts of Teheran. There are a number of women who find themselves coralled by the military police on duty for infractions of the law and Panahi constructs the drama around successive episodes that show up the law, and by extension Iranian society, for the insane absurdity that it is, such as the bravura sequence where a young woman, desperate to pee, eventually persuades her inflexible guard to let her go to the toilets. When there he instructs her to avert her eyes from the coarse Farsi graffiti on the toilet walls. The fact that the earthy female captives give as good as they get renders this act doubly absurd.

The women are all photographed without their chador, though crucially not with their hair uncovered (a restriction that Kiarostami circumvented in Ten by filming a shaven-headed young woman), though even still, filming women in baseball caps and military uniforms, in intentionally androgynous get-up is a risky and courageous act by the director, not to mention his actresses. Things such as these demonstrate how Iranian film directors must make do without freedoms that Western directors take so for granted that they abuse them readily, restrictions that have paradoxically turned Iranian cinema into one of the most thematically and formally inventive in the world. The film ends with celebrations among captors and captives alike as Iran qualify for Germany - though the fate of the women is still uncertain - and Panahi's filming of the street celebrations afterwards is breathtaking in its technical mastery; to shoot such a film on the night of the game itself - and much of it in the stadium - is astonishing. But then Panahi, like his mentor Kiarostami and the Makhmalbafs, and other filmmakers like Abol-fazl Jalili, has long been accustomed to fit his fiction to the template of everyday life and its potentially recalcitrant permutations. Offside may not be as rounded nor as possessed of such depth as his previous two films but it is still a remarkable feat of filmmaking. And, despite Kiarostami's mastery, Panahi has, by now made Teheran his own; when the provincial soldiers scold Teheran women for their outrageous morals, you can feel the glint of pride in the eye of the camera. Proud of being offside in the Mullahs' Iran.

Trials of Two Iranians

Israeli President Moshe Katsav has today been arrested on charge of raping a female colleague, after complaints of sexual assault by six women. Is this the first time a head of state has ever been arrested in this way? I recall a former Malaysian Prime Minister being tried on trumped-up charges of buggery a few years ago but he was not in office at the time and was framed by his political enemies. While I believe in the innocence of anyone until proven guilty, that such a thing could happen demonstrates the strength of Israeli civil society, which has much to admire about it in spite of that state's often disgraceful treatment of the Palestinian population.

Meanwhile the President of Katsav's country of origin, Iran, the zany Mahmoud Ahmedinijihad has claimed that his American counterpart, one Mr Bush, is guided by Satan and that Mahmoud himself has inspirational links with God, which is a lot like what Bush himself is reported to have claimed on a number of occasions. As Leonard Cohen once said, one of us can't be wrong. Or can we be? Who is more evil, Iran or Satan?

Iranian Jews

A fine piece in the New York Times on Saturday by Roya Hakakian, an Iranian Jew exiled in New York. Though the title is misleading, the recollection of growing up a Jew both in the Shah's Iran and after the so-called Islamic Revolution is both informative and touching. It will also surprise many people in this part of the world whose only knowledge of Iranian-Jewish relations is informed by the grotesque splutterings of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It also makes me think how naive people in the West are to be shocked at Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial; it is hardly terribly surprising that a religious fundamentalist, an ignorant ideological hoodlum whose view of civilisation is shared by barely half of his own country (if even) could utter nonsense that many Europeans with a pretention to rationality have already claimed before him. Israel is entitled to be concerned at the nuclear threat posed by Iran (though that sentence could just as easily be restated with the names of the two countries reversed) but casting Iran as an overwhelmingly anti-semitic country is unjustified and plain wrong.

Marjane Satrapi, since Persepolis

There is no particular reason to mention Marjane Satrapi at this moment in time: there is no new book out, I have not read anything new by her in over a year and many people reading this will already be familiar with her work. But there are snippets of news concerning the woman who has become probably the world's most famous Iranian artist, mainly through her superlative graphic novel Persepolis, originally published in French from 2000 to 2003, and which has since done the rounds of most the world's major languages. Next language up is Arabic, for an edition that had been due to be published by a Lebanese publisher in September. Whether the house in question has managed to weather the Israeli Defence Force's 'restructuring' of Lebanon is unknown, but the appearance of this fine work in Arabic would be truly ground-breaking, even if an edition in Satrapi's native language Farsi remains, sadly, a long way off. In addition to this there is the animated film version of the book, due to be released next year, to be co-directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud, with the voices of Chiara Mastroianni as Marjane and Mastroianni's real-life mother Catherine Deneuve as mother Satrapi.

For those that have not yet encountered Persepolis or any other Satrapi work, it is an autobiographical survey of life under the Islamic Revolution as a ten-year-old girl, and her later exile in Vienna attending a Catholic lycée and facing European prejudice and ignorance about her homeland. The book, aside from its narrative mastery, is distinguished by its heavily-inked visual style, which resembles wood-block prints and which casts its characters in semi-abstract physiognomies that Satrapi claims were the result of her being forbidden to draw realistic life studies in art college by the absurd strictures of the Islamic regime. It is a style that is also characteristic of L'Association, the Paris artists' co-operative that publishes Satrapi and which has also cultivated similarly distinctive styles in other artists such as Guy de Lisle, David B, and the already-established Swiss comic artist Johann Sfar.

Satrapi is technically a princess, being directly descended from the pre-Shah Persian kings, though her family, being Communist, have long abrogated that privilege. She now lives in Paris, on Place de Vosges, a mere ten minute walk from where I sit typing away now. Since Persepolis, she has won the Album of the Year award at Angoulême (the graphic novel equivalent of the Cannes Film Festival) twice, for Broderies (translated into English last year as Embroideries) and her last work Poulet aux prunes (as yet unavailable in English), a disarmingly simple tale of a musician uncle that died of a broken heart in the 1950s, that nonetheless moves in a new direction both structurally and thematically. It is one of the great ironies of the modern age that a country with as rich and great a civilisation as Iran should have to be explained to Westerners by comic books. Marjane Satrapi's books, even if they ever appear in Farsi, are unlikely to bring down the Ayatollahs but they should convince doubting people in Europe and North America of the folly of imposing another war on an innocent people in order to implement 'regime change'.