Watching the French-Iranian film “Subtraction” I think of Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s 1954 “Rear Window”. Why?
If you watch this film keep this refrain from the Door’s song “Riders on the Storm” in mind:
“There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road, yeah”
The easy part of the film is its beginning. Farzaneh (Taraneh Alidoosti) spots a man on a bus in Tehran whom she believes to be her husband Jalal (Navid Mohammadzadeh) disembarking and entering an apartment building. From the road outside the apartment building she sees this man talking with a woman by the window. Jalal vehemently denies it was him. In fact he was at a bank outside of the city centre from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. the day he supposedly disembarked from the bus.
Jalal visits the apartment and finds a woman Bita looking almost exactly like Farzaneh and not only that as matters transpire her husband Mohsen looks identical to Jalal! Mohsen is an aggressive and violent man. Yes Director Mani Haghighi is starting to play with our minds!
Farzaneh is on anti-depressants and suffers from anxiety and after believing Jalal’s denial he was not the man on the bus starts thinking she is having hallucinations. Yes viewer you may want to ask if the whole series of events is a hallucination! And you may be right.
Matters become more complicated and chance and circumstance take charge to the point you may be like a spectator with your mouth open at the twists and turns in the plot. You may feel like Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window” glued to the film like it is a window with a potential murderer on the other side of it.
Both a grisly and puzzling ending. Who is who? This must be an hallucination! Right?
All the Iranian directed films I have seen (aside from documentaries) take a jab at the theocracy but often in an allegorical way. As Canadian-Iranian director Haghighi states, “Living in a theocracy splits you in two. You must become two people to survive. A private life, and a public mask. The split seeps into the narrowest crevices of your life, and your every cell produces a simulacrum of itself: a copy that looks just like you. You produce this copy to protect yourself from the brutality around you. You produce this copy the protect yourself from the brutality around you, but it can turn against you and destroy you.”
And yes don’t forget the never-ending “rain” in Tehran even when sunny. Get the hint?
“Subtraction” opens in Canada on June 23, 2023.
RKS 2023 Film Rating 96/100.
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