The Actor

This 1993 film by the eclectic and talented Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed) is a contemporary, semitragic farce about a burly film actor who wants to play only in art films but is forced by his family’s economic demands to act in a string of trashy commercial movies. His tormented wife, infertile and obsessed with having a baby, insists that her husband marry and impregnate a second wife, a deaf-mute Gypsy, to provide them with a child. What keeps this picture frenetic, apart from the hysterical action and the satirical treatment of Iranian media, is the couple’s surreal, high-tech home and Makhmalbaf’s hyperbolic, eccentric mise en scene, which fit together hand in glove (as they were undoubtedly designed to do). The three lead actors–Akbar Abdi (playing some version of himself), Fatemeh Motamed Aria, and Mahaya Petrossian–were all in Once Upon a Time, Cinema, Makhmalbaf’s previous feature, and there appear to be some cross-references (such as the hero’s Chaplin worship), but here the tone is more caustic, the inventiveness more pointed. The meanings of both films are less than entirely clear, but my hunch is that each is a comic allegory about the rift between traditional and contemporary Iran, in which class differences and cultural differences are equally pertinent. Read more

Freedom on My Mind

A conventionally made documentary about the Mississippi Voter Registration Project, which existed from 1961 to 1964, this is special because of the precise sense of time and place it manages to impart through archival footage and recent interviews, as well as for the exemplary history lesson it offers about a key branch of the civil rights struggle. Produced and directed by Connie Field (The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter) and Marilyn Mulford and written and edited by Michael Chandler, it not only offers a welcome corrective to the multiple obfuscations of Mississippi Burning; it also furnishes the viewer with enough solid information to reevaluate the subject intelligently. (Whether you regard the civil rights movement as a whole as a success or as a failure, chances are you’ll have a more complicated view after seeing this.) Among the interview subjects are many Mississippi activists (including Victoria Gray, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, L.C. Dorsey, and Curtis Hayes) as well as those who came to the scene from other states (including Bob Moses, Marshall Ganz, and Pam Chude Allen), and the story they have to tell remains an essential part of our history. This won the grand jury prize for best documentary at the 1994 Sundance film festival. Read more