Tragedy of the Loneliness of Man and Woman in Three Acts

A review of the film Falling House by Mohsen Gharaei

Armin Ebrahimi

Falling House, with its original Persian title Morāqeb (meaning both “the one who looks after and cares for another” and “a prison guard”), premiered yesterday, September 2, at the Venice Film Festival. Falling House is a film by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Gharaei about a poor family in Tehran. An apparently simple matter—the imminent migration of the daughter to a neighboring country in pursuit of her modeling dreams—triggers a series of events within the family that results in catastrophe.

The screenplay written by Mohsen Gharaei is rich in multi-layered details. It advances stage by stage, each stage preparing the ground for the next. Its complex arrangement and structure show that it has been crafted with great care. In the first section we are introduced to Rashid’s job: a middle-aged man who has worked for thirty years as a prison guard (in one sequence we see him bringing lunch to the prisoners, though we later learn he himself does not like prison food). In this same section, an incident leads to Rashid’s arrest. We discover him to be a hard-working, kind-hearted man who is a friend and supporter of the prisoners, and at home a tender, affectionate father to his young daughters and wife. He has two daughters: The older daughter wants to become a model; the younger one, ashamed of her father’s job, prefers to stop going to school. Her aspiration is to rent an apartment someday, in a neighborhood that is not particularly upscale, which can be seen as an indication of the girl’s realistic view of life.

This same quality runs throughout the film and characterizes the director’s worldview. The film is thoroughly realistic in its treatment of the characters’ situations, of the world it presents, and especially of its ending. It avoids slogans and keeps its distance from taking sides. Without aligning itself with any particular party or issuing political opinions, it simply strives to tell its story—with its cinematic language and without excess. It is full of poetic moments, yet not so much that they overshadow the work as a whole. It contains moments of the characters’ solitude and innocence, and in its characterizations it maintains a realistic stance. Rashid, who in the first third appears as a victimized, vulnerable, and kind-hearted man, progresses in the second section toward becoming a dangerous and selfish figure.Yet the crucial point to keep in mind is that he does not transform from one character into another. Even in his most terrifying moments he still retains traces of his earlier compassion and kindness. The younger daughter (played with truly remarkable skill by Laleh Marzban), who at first seemed to have a reasonable plan for getting rich, appears in the talent-agency sequence as someone who might be easily deceived. Yet both of these characters undergo a further change in the third section and reach a different plane. We come to understand that whether the daughter has been deceived or not, it is secondary; what matters is that her longing and passion for this work are genuine. She is truly devoted to it, and the filmmaker beautifully illuminates the subject of women’s freedom through this very narrative thread. Yet because the filmmaker is a realist in his approach, he knows he must also show the less rational aspects of the situation. That is why he also draws the younger daughter into the possible migration plot.

Falling House follows the same, constantly-evolving approachto character development with Rashid. By the end he, too, is a more complete character. His personality is not frozen at the peak of violence. Rather, until the very end of the film everything continues to change and evolve like a living organism, including the mother. She is not a one-dimensional housewife. At the same time that we learn she has in the past remained silent in the face of Rashid’s patriarchal demands, we also see that she is capable of taking risks to save her children. It is she who, throughout all these years, not merely as a supplementary earner but as someone with an income higher than her husband’s, has in effect been running the family.

If one pays close attention, all three characters have a relationship with the issue of work. At the beginning of the film Rashid is employed, yet at work he is treated like a pest, like a guilty creature. He switches jobs, and after being suspended he decides to become the jailer of his own daughters. The film itself alludes to these parallel prisons. The mother, however, suffers no decline in her own work; she is even trying to obtain higher wages for her sewing. She spends the income that Rashid earns from an unreliable source on building her daughter’s future. The daughter, too, has an upwardly aspiring relationship with her work. Having accepted that miserable, uncomfortable photography job in the back of a shop just to earn a little income, she dreams of modeling for global brands. At one point the younger daughter says to her father, “When I grow up I’ll end up just like my sister.” The only one in this family who has no intention of making progress is Rashid.

Another character present in the film is the house itself. A house that, because it lies within a municipal redevelopment plan, must be demolished; all the preparatory work has been done and now only the bulldozers need to move in. Despite all the memories and the bitter and sweet moments it holds, the house is a place that must be left behind for a better life—or for the dream of a better life. Remaining in the house leads to nothing but destruction, like the bricks and stones. In those apocalyptic ruins on the outskirts of Tehran, the mother and her daughters are packing their belongings to go somewhere else, somewhere not under threat of demolition, while the father decides to act differently. The film is, in the true sense of the word, a work in praise of women’s freedom, about the will and the astonishing strength of women who strive for a better life even under hard conditions.

Director Mohsen Gharaei

With astonishing skill the filmmaker constructs the vast world of his film moment by moment. The narrative is built from small yet unforgettable moments—and also from bitter images that refuse to leave the viewers. Images such as a number of raisins, the writing left on the remnants of a demolished wall, a piece of black cloth on the barbed wire atop a wall, the flower used to hold the barbed wire aside in order to jump over the wall, that charming homeless, and the way the writer handles the motif of “sitting,” as various characters force Rashid to sit in front of them, or stand, and sit again.

Falling House is one of the best films to come out of Iranian cinema in recent years. If you have followed Iranian cinema over the past decade you will recognize this film as a work that is balanced in its social expression yet ambitious in its latent meanings, especially its idea of ‘possibilities’, and one thatreaches a brilliant ending. Mohsen Gharaei’s film opens different possibilities before the viewer at every moment, and that is by no means an easy achievement.