Salaam Cinema: On Mohsen Makhmalbaf | The Nation

“The first thing that shocked me” about Israel, says Makhmalbaf, now dressed in a white shirt and looking slightly subdued the morning after the first Jerusalem screening of The Gardener, is that “it was like Iran. I felt I was in Iran.” And “especially in Haifa, many alleys and streets—the same as Iran.” Even in Jerusalem, he says, the markets were just like those in his hometown. It is extremely odd to be sitting just upstairs from the theater where, some sixteen years ago, I first saw one of his movies, and hearing Makhmalbaf say the exact same thing—or the mirror image of the exact same thing—I’d thought back then: Jerusalem could be Tehran.

His new movie is designed, as he puts it, to shed “light on religion’s power”—though, as always, his approach is tantalizingly ambiguous: religion’s power to do good? Its power to harm? Set in the peculiarly pristine Bahai gardens that cascade like a bright green cataract down the terraced northern face of Mount Carmel in Haifa, the movie also features several scenes that take place at the relic-cluttered holy sites of Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s hard not to see the two towns as somehow representing the opposing points of view that make up the movie’s dialectical structure and are outlined in an early scene by Makhmalbaf’s pop-star-handsome son Maysam, who explains in voiceover that the film will alternate between “two angles”: the younger man’s camera will be directed at religion’s negative aspects, while the elder Makhmalbaf will, well, accentuate the positive. The movie unfolds as a conversation between these apparently dueling perspectives.

While that may sound reductive, even simple-minded, remember who’s in charge here. Makhmalbaf began his life as an extremely devout Muslim and, after attempting to steal a gun from one of the shah’s policemen, spent five years in prison, during which time he was tortured and just escaped the firing squad. After the 1979 revolution and his release, he became a hugely popular filmmaker and self-declared agnostic as well as an outspoken supporter of a secular, democratic Iran. He left the country when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005 but remains an underground culture hero back home, and he is still considered enough of a threat to the regime that the Supreme Leader has, he says, sent teams of secret police, armed with bombs and grenades, to try to harm or intimidate the filmmaker, who has been forced to flee with his family from Afghanistan to Tajikistan to Paris and now to London. He is at present persona absolutely non grata in Iran, where his films and writing are banned—though they circulate widely in pirated form and on the Internet. 

All of which may explain why the prospect of shooting a movie in Israel and then attending its gala opening in Jerusalem seems not to have fazed him. Though the penalty in Iran for visiting the so-called Zionist entity is a five-year prison term, a man with a death sentence hanging over his head may feel such a threat a kind of furlough. His visit to Israel did elicit various predictable denunciations: the director of Iran’s cinematic organizations condemned his “embrace of the usurpers of Jerusalem and…criminal Zionism,” and a group of Iranian writers, artists and scholars criticized him harshly for not boycotting the festival and its Israeli sponsors: “We are deeply dismayed at Mr. Makhmalbaf’s disregard for the global movement for Palestinian human rights and the implicit support for Israel’s apartheid policies.” In response, Makhmalbaf told the Persian service of the BBC that “boycotting and writing statements does not solve anything. Why don’t the intellectuals try to solve the problems by traveling and having dialogue? Why is there no effort to remove religious hatred?”

In this charged context, the choice to make Bahaism the “star” of The Gardener is pointed. It’s also clever, since the subject of the fate and faith of this relatively minor religious group allows him to sidle up to bigger questions that haunt the Middle East in general—without addressing them head-on. Established in Iran around 170 years ago, Bahaism has been under siege there since its inception: its founder was sent into exile and suffered various persecutions as he wandered. Even today, the religion’s Iranian adherents are severely oppressed—harassed, jailed and sometimes executed.

Although Makhmalbaf says that he set out to make a movie about the human rights abuses suffered by the Bahai in Iran, in the end his film evolved into a far more philosophical affair—an attempt to understand not just this particular religion but the impulse toward religion in general. As presented in The Gardener, Bahaism is the ultimate peace-loving potpourri, blending turn-the-other-cheek Christian acceptance of one’s enemies with a Buddhist desire for self-knowledge, a Sufi sense of the unity of all creation, and a Hindu belief in a kind of karma, together with total Gandhi-esque devotion to the spirit of nonviolence. “Sometimes people are mean to us,” a beaming, American-born blond Bahai explains to a group of small children in the film. ”But we,” she adds, surrounded by immaculate banks of flowers, “just show them kindness.” 

As the lights come up in the theater, a friend wrinkles her nose and pronounces the film “a marshmallow.” On the one hand, I know what she means. It’s not just the treacly tone of the Makhmalbafs’ various interlocutors that makes a somewhat cranky Jewish viewer shift in her seat. The film’s particular brand of petal-strewn prettiness—its saturated palette and occasionally precious camera angles, reminiscent of Makhmalbaf’s more deliberately “decorative” movies, Gabbeh, Kandahar and The Silence—does at times suggest the sugary filling of a cinematic s’more. 

On the other hand, this is the restless, relentless Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and my own sense is that The Gardener isn’t a pious prescription so much as the next chapter in the director’s ongoing exchange with his audience about the nature of reality and illusion, truth and consequences. His “characters” may offer up various high-minded devotional maxims, but that doesn’t mean he himself subscribes to them wholesale. His son’s onscreen persona repeatedly articulates his impatience with such righteous rhetoric, and after my conversation with Makhmalbaf (who gently points out that he was the author of his son’s lines in the script), it seems clear that he is more skeptical than not about the nature of organized religion and aware of the possibly cataclysmic dangers of too fervent faith, especially in this part of the world. In the end neither “for” nor “against,” the movie offers an unusually subtle fusion of the two purportedly oppositional points of view.

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

If anything, Makhmalbaf’s own religion seems to have more to do with filmmaking itself, which, he says in The Gardener, is the extension of his eye, a kind of meditation. “I want,” he says in an early scene, “to learn to see better.” Though when I ask him if the movies are his religion, he corrects me: “Morality,” he says, “is my religion.” By which he means, he says, human dignity: “We’ve lost that, everywhere.” 

“So for you, the camera is a way to get closer to that morality?”

“Absolutely.” Makhmalbaf then launches into a wistful disquisition on the need for mutual respect and the loss of that throughout the world—in the politicians’ offices, in the clerics’ chambers, in Israel, in Iran. “Where,” the director wonders, “are we going?”

Where are we going, indeed? It’s a question I continue to ask as I wander out into the strong July light and hear the tram bell chime sweetly. Lavish race cars and locked-up puppets, petunia-filled parks and expropriated land, Sheldon Adelson and Mohsen Makhmalbaf—Jerusalem has something for everyone this summer. I, too, would like to see better.