“Santouri” is a commercial venture. Dariush Mehrjui, the director, studied film at UCLA forty years ago, and has since conveyed his themes through the trenchant hues of genre filmmaking, a style that is heavily influenced by American cinema.
With “Santouri,” he tackles the hip theme of artistic repression in the Iranian boondocks, and sculpts his piece as more romantic, and more histrionic, than any film made in the past year.
It is all about Ali (Bahram Radan), a young married man who plays the traditional stringed santour, an instrument that is played with mallets and sounds like a harpsichord, and his tragic journey as a bankrupt dope-fiend after he becomes jobless and has to rely on his beautiful wife, Hanieh (Golshifteh Farahani), for financial support. He loses his santour, his wife and eventually his mind.
Mehrjui makes it clear that Ali is not responsible for his cloud. As the film opens, the government is getting stricter with enforcing its laws against social amusement. They take away Ali’s concerts, making it impossible to make a living as a musician, and Ali begins playing at seedy venues where the hosts can’t pay him much, but “take good care of him,” he says in a voice-over. One doesn’t have money, so he pays Ali in opium; another pays him in booze. This continues until Ali finds himself trapped within the limits of the heroin circle.
“Poor Ali Santouri,” his wife says, when reflecting on her husband’s diving bell.
Ali is a vitalist. He shoots up for the same reason he plays his music: to feel alive, in a country where it is hard for him to do what he loves without conservative forces driving him towards ruin. A harrowing scene occurs when he is about to lose his apartment and he goes to his childhood home see his mother, who is hosting a prayer group. In a high voice, close to hysteria, he demands an early inheritance from her so that he can buy more dope. When she hands him a parcel of cash and sends him on his way, his mother says to her other son, now middle-aged, “Haven’t I given you boys everything? Take a look at the basement, where you will see all of the toys I gave to you as kids.”
Like the current Iran, which gives its citizens an enormous wealth of cultural and tradition to play with, but confines people within the limits of conservatism, Ali’s mother failed to give him the freedom he needed. Long ago, his parents disowned him for choosing to be a musician.
Ali’s older brother, who still lives with his parents, praises Ali for standing up to the grown-up strictures of their domineering mother. To him, and to the viewer, Ali is not a bad egg. His troubles strike the film with the carriage of an Iranian climate, post-revolution, where the law is crashing down on the youth so hard their spirits are often crushed. Wrapped up in Ali is a quality that we rarely see in film and literature, of the human essence to endure, even when the narrative geometry of a story is against you.
Watch “Santouri” to enjoy a genre film that takes place in a country that has been in the news a lot lately, and is capable of making a subversive statement without boring you.
Ehssan Barkeshli is the News Editor for La Voz.
