The other day I saw Mohammad Rasoulof’s The White Meadows (Keshtzaarhaay Sepid), the first installment of the Iranian Film Festival at the Freer and Sackler Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The promotional material sounded like another slow-paced Iranian movie that would bore me to tears (not that I don’t enjoy watching Iranian movies). However, I found The White Meadows to be the gutsiest and most visually artistic Iranian movie that I’ve seen. The movie is a powerful indictment of the power structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Through allegory, it shows how the current regime uses superstition and religious rituals to oppress the populace, and through the suppression of freedoms, perpetuate its own power. A couple of warnings before you read on: 1) if you don’t want to know what happens in the movie just read the movie reviews included in the links at the end of this blog; 2) I’m not a professional critic, so please excuse my amateurish analysis and feel free to add to it or criticize my take. At first, I was going to just search for reviews of the movie and include it in a blog and give my recommendation; however, I did not find a movie review by an Iranian and I think that much of the symbolism in the movie may have been lost by the non-Iranian movie critic.
The movie starts with Rahmat rowing his boat on a salty sea (probably shot on Lake Oorumieh) to different islands with unusual salt formations to perform various duties, notably collecting tears of the superstitious inhabitants of each island. He is meticulous in his responsibility of tear collection, cleaning each of the intricate vials used for the collection of tears and at one point admitting that each tear drop is important to him and that in his job of tear collection in 30 years, this ritual feels as important and noble as the first time he did it. When he arrives at the first island, the inhabitants are waiting for him to take the dead body of a young beautiful woman to a cemetery as the hard salty ground is not conducive to burial. An elder on the island laments the beautiful dead woman and confesses that it was best that she died as her beauty was distracting all the men on the island. He even mused that if she was to be buried on the island, the men may dig her up. It was left to the viewer to imagine what those men would have done to her dead body.
Prior to leaving the island, Rahmat collects the tears of the mourners and carefully funnels the tears into a jar. It turns out that the men, in fact, did not put her body on Rahmat’s boat but instead put a 15-year-old boy covered with a white shroud. The boy lay motionless in the boat in hopes that Rahmat would take him to his shepherd father who had left the family when he was a child. Enticed by seeing the beauty of the dead woman, Rahmat uncovers the shroud to discover the boy. He agrees to take the boy with him if he acts as if he’s mute and deaf. At this point, I see the contradiction in Rahmat’s character. He confides to the boy that his relationship with the people is based on trust, but his decision not to turn over the boy to the inhabitants of the island and get the dead body contradicts his earlier statement. In fact our understanding of Rahmat’s sense of duty shifts throughout the film until we see him at the end as part of the oppressive apparatus. On the first island, we see how women are objectified as dangerous seductresses and how this belief relieves men of accountability for sexual exploitation of women. On the second island, Shiite Islam is invoked as a means of justifying the sad and hopeless lives of the islanders. Upon arriving at the island, Rahmat hears of an islander’s fear that the “fairy” (pari) is in a well (reminiscent of Mahdi hiding in a well) and since it had inhabited the well, the sea had become saltier. Rahmat learns that the islanders are waiting for the fairy to emerge from the well so that it will rain and the sea will become less salty. To accomplish the re-emergence of the fairy, people whisper their anguish in a glass jar and seal it with a lid. After they are done with the ritual of sealing their heartache into the jar, they cry, and Rahmat collects their tears. Then they turn over the jar to the man who is in charge of the ritual and then the next person is called to come forward. After all inhabitants perform their duty and Rahmat collects the tears, a dwarf named Khojasteh (auspicious) is called in to carry all the jars on his back to the bottom of the well. The dwarf is afraid that he will not survive this task and will fall to his death. The dwarf is let down with a rope into the well by the townspeople who have gathered around the well. Invoking the muslim first prayer of the morning, they yell “go” and “faster” to encourage Khojasteh to deliver the jars before the sun rises. Unfortunately for Khojasteh, the sun rises before he’s made it to the bottom of the well and the man in charge of the ritual cuts Khojasteh’s rope with a knife. You can hear Khojasteh falling to the bottom of the well and the jars breaking while his wife wails at the top of the well. Khojasteh’s failure to resurrect the fairy hidden in the well shows how religious belief can be used and amplified through mob mentality to keep the powers of the religious leaders intact. The rituals in play on the third island amplify how women are commodities for powerful men while younger men who challenge the power structure are banished or killed. The inhabitants of the third island are awaiting Rahmat to collect the tears of an underaged and unwilling bride. Later, Rahmat also collects the tears of the bride’s mother. The 15-year-old boy from the first island who is accompanying Rahmat is smitten by the beautiful girl, who is sitting in front of Rahmat in a tent in the finest dress that befits a bride. The girl is dragged away from the tent and put on a raft while she pleads to Rahmat to intervene. She slowly disappears into the endless sea. While Rahmat is looking for the 15-year-old boy, the inhabitants inform him that the boy has gone to rescue the girl, but they have sent a couple of men to retrieve him. After they retrieve the boy, the island’s elder ties him to a pier footing so the men and stone him to death. The shore contains many of these tall wooden footings sticking upright from the ground. Rahmat tells the boy not to say a word and may this event be a lesson for him. Rahmat only picks one small stone from the tray of the stones that is being offered to the stone throwers. The boy’s head is covered by a metal pot and the men hiding behind the piers throw the sharp-edged stones at him. The boy cannot withstand the stoning and cries loudly, telling the men to stop. At this point, Rahmat intervenes and tells the men it’s a miracle that his boy has started to talk. The men stop and Rahmat loads up the half-dead boy onto his boat and rows to the next island. On the fourth island, a painter is buried up to his neck for the sin of coloring the sea red in his paintings. He asks Rahmat for water to which the tear gatherer complies. The painter is then dug out of the salt and tortured in various ways for his error of not seeing the sea as blue. He’s dunked into the sea, made to go up a ladder and look at the sun directly, and at one point held down while one of the men pours monkey’s urine in his eyes, all attempts to correct his vision. They even beg him to just admit the sea is blue even if he doesn’t see it that way. The painter says that he can still see despite various attempts at making him blind. Rahmat then loads up the painter, along with the semi-conscious boy, and rows to the fifth island. At this point, Rahmat who may have at first been viewed as a compassionate and unwilling participant in people’s misery, is seen as complicit in making people prisoners of a nebulous power.
The fifth and last island is a prison where Rahmat delivers the artist and the half-dead boy. An old man, the islands only inhabitant, convinces Rahmat to stay the night so that for at least one night he won’t be lonely. During the night, the old man confides to Rahmat that he misses his old life and his sheep (hinting that he’s the boy’s lost father). In the morning, they find the boy dead (invoking the father-son tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab) and carry him off to the sea, where they weigh him down with buckets of stones attached to an empty tin can that bobs out of water. This is an eerie scene in which a countless number of tin cans bobbing in the water, suggesting markers for the thousands of prisoners who had perished while in captivity. The scene ends with the old warden submitting the artist to pointless exertion, shouting repeatedly, “What color is the sea? It’s blue.”
At the end of the film, Rahmat makes his way to a land without salt meadows; it is full of trees and garden groves. He’s let in the gates by a leery watchman while another picks fruit from the garden. Rahmat sits in the middle of a room and takes out his full bottle of tears and waits. An old man in a wheelchair is pushed into the room by the young bride who was sent out to the sea from the third island. There’s a painting on the wall which depicts an island in a red sea. Rahmat dutifully puts a tub under the frail feet of the old man in the wheelchair and carefully washes his feet with the tears from the bottle. The old man, symbolic of Iran’s spiritual leader, has access to all that has been deemed taboo or sacrificed in the name of religion. After the young bride pushes the old man in the wheelchair out of the room, Rahmat carefully pours the excess tears back into the bottle. In the last scene, Rahmat pours the excess tears from the bottle into the sea, making the sea even saltier.
I’ve scratched the surface of ways to interpret the allegory presented in The White Meadows and would like to hear from others who have seen the film. For me, watching the film was a powerful experience. It is not surprising that both Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi (the editor of the movie) were given six-year jail sentences in December, 2010, even though no anti-government sentiment is explicitly stated by any of the characters in the film. Ironically, by accusing the filmmakers of making an anti-government film, the regime admits its own guilt.
Barry Byrne’s review: http://www.screendaily.com/5005967.article John Lichman’s review: http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/21760/
