Saturday, April 16, 2011

"Crimson Gold" (2003)

A common narrative trick: start from the end (a botched robbery, a murder, a suicide) and then ask the question, "How did we arrive here?" We arrive here by asking questions, questions which are answered by social schemes so large, so disjointed, so obviously impractical and unfair, that no answers are committed to the public record: one rides through the city streets like a taxi driver, or a pizza delivery man, aghast at the senseless disorder that lies concealed beneath the orderly surface of a buzzing metropolis. One only watches, from afar, or even, from within the 9th circle of political malfeasance, in the belly of the elite class as it overlooks the city of Tehran from a high rise apartment building. (The idea of a pizza delivery man being invited to eat dinner with a particularly oblivious, particularly wealthy young student-type is what makes Crimson Gold a movie-movie.) A common binary is erected: the disaffected wealthy (who are occasionally harassed for failing to abide by Islamic codes of decency), and the ill-affected not-wealthy (who are only harassed when they commit crimes, when they are not being categorically ignored and neglected by the society that raises them -- just as it would be in any other country in the world). For the principal characters in the film are not strictly poor or unemployed or homeless, they are rather discontented, in the way of social, perhaps even a faintly marxist, discontentment. But Crimson Gold is really the case study of a single man, an isolated citizen of discontentment -- Hussein -- who against his own profound sense of dignity -- a dignity as evidentially large as he appears in relation to everyone who stands next to him -- commits a crime against a system of neglect, for those who are honest and lowly, the worst form of criminal injustice.

Despite Panahi's terrific sense for composition (which is really this film's chief excellence, its narrative structure) there is something partly glib in juxtaposing Hussein's rat-infested, tattered shanty of a home with the rich young man's luxury apartment into which he is invited and over which he swoons in some kind of sensory overload, astonished to find that upper class Iranians are capable of living in such absurd grandeur. There is also something crafty, or perhaps culturally ingrown, in the cause-and-effect order Panahi gives to Hussein's momentary drinking binge and the consequent scene transition into the setting for the crime he commits, as if somehow acknowledging that, yes, intoxicating oneself on alcohol in an Islamic society may inevitably lead to crime. Or perhaps this sequencing only plays into a false logic that is meant to fool the censors? Perhaps the intoxication -- meaning, Hussein's symbolic intoxication at seeing so much luxury compounded in a single apartment, and his chemical intoxication by the wine he guzzles with a teenager's zest while he bathes (literally) in the apartment's grandiosity -- was merely a kind of bait for the ethics committee, a social verdict that would please anyone who would find partying, dancing, and drinking into the wee hours offensive? Yet no one, we learn, is guilty: and the scene in which Hussein is forced to wait out his pizza deliveries while the ethics police take innocent bystanders hostage in an effort to apprehend the guests of a dance party, reveals the most important aspect of Hussein's character: he is generous, and he is willing to give rather than take. The tragedy, of course, lies in the reversal of what makes Hussein honest: sickened by the inability to retain any sense of satisfaction in his own life, he decides ultimately to take, by force, symbolic revenge on the social order that subjects him to a constant and intolerable bystandership.

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