THE MORNING LIST
In theaters this week, two documentaries by Mehran Tamadon in which the filmmaker has actors or former victims reenact the abuse suffered in Iranian prisons. But also the portrait of a thirty-something New Yorker stuck in a dull life that the practice of BDSM sex fails to spice up, a comedy among others which will also rub shoulders with upsetting, forbidden or hindered love stories.
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“My worst enemy” and “Where God is not”: Mehran Tamadon tries to exorcise the violence of the Iranian regime
Deeply linked to the modernity of Iranian cinema, Mehran Tamadon, although he has lived in France since adolescence, loves nothing more than formal experimentation, the twisting of forms and meanings. A combat documentary filmmaker, he set out to meet, in 2007, in Bassidji, of this militia of young martyrs called to the Iraqi battlefield. In 2014, he imagined in Iranian to lock himself in his home for two days with four mullahs, just to experience the virtues of a healthy dialogue with the enemy.
My worst enemy (released May 8) and Where God is not (May 15) take things even further. In the first, he asks compatriots like him exiled in France to play the regime’s henchmen in a filmed interrogation session in which he would be the guinea pig, then to appear in Iran with this film to convince the security services there to recognize himself in it, the first step in a secret repentance that he yearns for.
Bringing the question of simulation back to the profession, Where God does not exist uses a slightly more traditional process, asking former victims of abuse to re-enact their time in Iranian prisons. Although confined in a depot in the Paris suburbs, the film uses a sort of bodily and behavioral recollection of the characters. Two men and a woman testify here from experiences and in significantly different registers, each time arousing striking emotion. J.Ma.
French documentaries by Mehran Tamadon (1h22 and 1h52).
“Life According to Ann”: Joanna Arnow’s Little Theater of Unease
In the well-regulated market of American cinema, is there room left for these small, twisted and unclassifiable films for which the field of independence was for a long time lavish? Life According to Ann proves it by engaging in a form of derogatory self-portrait, in the tradition of New York Jewish comedy. The one who lends herself to the exercise is Joanna Arnow, a young filmmaker who, not content with taking on the writing, directing and editing of her film, puts herself on stage in the skin of her heroine, and the painting of an unconventional sexuality.
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