A Hero (2021): All Too Human

Asghar Farhadi, one of the greatest film auteurs (writer-directors) currently active and certainly a favorite of mine, has a new picture coming out. In the past decade, Farhadi’s movies have probably received more nominations and won more international awards than any other director, with two of his movies taking home the Oscar for Best International Film [A Separation in 2012 and The Salesman in 2017.**]  I don’t think I have ever quoted Vanity Fair before, but its article reviewing A Hero (calling it “rich and complex”) got it right when its heading proclaimed: “Asghar Farhad Makes Films for the World – And the World is Listening”. 

[**Only three other international directors have won two such Oscars in competition since the category was added in 1956: Fellini (who won four times: 1956, 1957, 1963, and 1974), Bergman (three times: 1960, 1961, 1983), and De Sica twice: 1964, 1971. Not bad company!] 

Anyway, if you are already a fan of Farhadi’s films, you need no convincing. The new movie is called A Hero, and trust me, you will want to see it. It is slated for release in early January 2022, with possible brief December runs in New York and L.A. to qualify for the 2022 Academy Awards.  

In Iran, a person who does not pay a judicially confirmed debt can, upon request of the creditor, be imprisoned until the debt is repaid.  If the debtor can’t afford to pay, he may remain incarcerated for years.  In such cases, release may depend on charitable contributions or on the debtor or family members persuading the creditor to forgive the debtor at least withdraw their complaint. This is a violation of international law [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)], but Iran doesn’t seem to care.  [Nor do a number of other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, and until very recently, Egypt.]

Rahim, the protagonist in Farhadi’s  A Hero, has been in prison for two or three years for failing to repay a large loan he had received from Braham, his then father-in-law [or maybe he’s a brother-in-law? I can’t remember and doesn’t matter.] The money was to help start a small business, but Rahim’s partner ran off with all of it, the business never got off the ground, and Rahim had no way to repay. Nor did his family. Not long after the debacle, his wife divorced him, so Braham is now an ex in-law - and still very angry about the still unpaid debt.  That’s the setup. 

A Hero opens as Rahirm (Amir Jadidi) is released from the prison and walks away with a broad smile on his face, a grin so white we can see it from a hundred yards away, bright enough to light up an arena. Anyone would be happy to get out of jail, but Rahim has only been released on a two-day leave, after which he’ll have to go back. But he doesn’t look like a guy expecting to go back.  A handsome man with his shock of wavy, dark brown hair and those pearly whites, he comes across at first sight as someone who’d make ladies swoon and men eager to bask in his presence. Which is to say, he looks like a million bucks.  

He feels like it too, too. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh [Sahar Goldust] has recently found a woman’s handbag on the street, containing seventeen gold coins – which they believe may be worth well over half the amount owed. Rahim and Farkhondeh believe that with the money they hope to get for the coins, Rahim can leverage Braham to withdraw his complaint – triggering an end to Rahim’s jail term - and agree to a payback plan for the balance. 

There are, as you'd expect, a couple of glitches in their plan.  Rahim can’t explain how he got the money because, for the moment, his relationship with Farkhondeh is a secret (wrong caste, family issues) - a problem because Braham has zero trust in Rahim and will want to know where the money came from. And then it turns out that the coins are worth less than they hoped – still a significant amount, but too little to persuade Braham to withdraw his complaint.

So, Rahim switches gears and decides to do the right thing: he’ll try to return the coins to whoever lost them. As there was no ID in the handbag, he puts up flyers all around the area, asking the owner to come forward and identify the bag and its contents. The flyer says that Rahim found the bag (in order to maintain the secrecy of his relationship with Farkhondeh), but that’s an inconsequential detail, right? As his leave is just about up, Rahim uses the prison phone number on the flyer as the way to reach him.  

When word gets out that this poor guy sitting in debtor’s prison is trying to return found money, the prison officials, the press and social media all go crazy with admiration. Just beneath the surface, however, things are knottier and a bit more tangled than they appear. 

As I noted in my review his The Salesman, Farhadi films are about human nature, including our not uncommon tendency to mislead ourselves or others – sometimes with honorable intentions - by withholding facts, dissembling or, as lawyers might say, assuming facts not in evidence. His stories center on incidents of this kind in the lives of ordinary people – when seemingly little things turn out to have an outsize effect, impelling his characters to make fateful and revealing choices. Choices which create complications, requiring more choices, eventually resulting in moral quandaries. Along the way we also get subtle and not so subtle social commentary about class, the idea of progress, gender roles, the role of law, culture and custom and so forth.

My review of his 2009 film, About Elly, was entitled Secrets and Lies, because Farhadi’s story centered on how the deception of little white lies and unspoken truths can corrode relationships and lead to unintended consequences. The plot details in A Hero are completely different from that earlier picture, but there is an image from About Elly that comes to mind as an apt allegory that applies equally to this new film. About Elly involved a group of young adults vacationing together at a rented beach house. One of their vehicles has gotten stuck in the sand. The tide is rising and the sea’s waves are encroaching. As members of the party push, the car spins its wheels trying desperately to extricate itself, all the while digging itself deeper into the mire.

Farhadi likes to encapsulate his themes in symbolic sequences. That scene in About Elly, was a coda. In The Salesman, there’s an early moment that serves as a prophecy. The two married protagonists, Emad and Rana, are in their apartment when everything starts to shake violently, dishes and books tumble from shelves, windows break, walls crack, people in other apartments scream. When the quaking subsides, they have to evacuate and find a new place to live – everything is upended. Talk about foreshadowing!

Farhadi usually has more than one aim in his filmmaking. In A Separation (2015), for example, he presents us with a domestic drama about the disintegration of a marriage. But it is also about the stratification of Iranian society into two primary, irreconcilable castes: the world of the West-leaning, educated, sophisticated, unobservant upper-middle class – people who might mount a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, for example;  and the world of the relatively uneducated, unsophisticated, strictly observant, poor and working classes, where the women wear burkas, and people wouldn’t dream of seeing a western play or movie or listen to western music.

In A Hero, Rahim’s story illustrates the relative nature of truth and truthfulness, acknowledging the attraction of light fibbing in some situations, but also the risk this carries of adverse or even catastrophic practical and reputational repercussions if the dishonesty is found out. It also provokes a number of ethical questions, like: Does choosing not to do a bad thing, i.e. doing the right thing, amount to a good deed? Is a white lie less dishonorable than a fraudulent one? 

Then there's the related, yet different second theme integrating a case-in-point critique of the mob-like mentality of social media and so-called cancel culture, with its disregard for factuality – or nuance of any kind. 

A Hero, by contrast, is not lacking in nuance. As Rahim’s situation grows ever more complicated, so also does our understanding of Rahim himself and the many characters within his orbit: his friends and family, his girlfriend Farkhondeh, his nemesis Braham (and Braham’s daughter Nazanin, played by Farhadi's daughter Sarina Farhadi), the directors of a local charity who are trying to help Rahim, and even the prison officials who also get into the act. When things start going south, though, everything begins to unravel. Even by the surprising conclusion of the film, there remain a number of enigmatic loose ends, leaving we viewers with the very realistic notion that nothing is neat and simple in this world. No one is innocent; all are sullied in one way or another.

As usual with Farhadi, the actors all are terrific (especially the amazing Amir Jadidi in the lead), the photography is spot-on and production values generally are excellent. Simply put, A Hero is an intelligent, captivating and intriguing film. 

After all, we are in the hands of a master filmmaker here. 

2 hours 7 minutes PG-13

Grade: A

Scheduled theatrical release is January 6, 2022; Streaming on Amazon prime video beginning January 21, 2022 .