Like most jewels of Iranian cinema—Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, say, or Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards—Jafar Panahi's 2003 film, Crimson Gold, is remarkable for the frankness with which it depicts contemporary Iran. Remarkable, too, is the way that Panahi's unsentimental depiction of a man pushed to the edge by the system prefigures, however slightly, more recent events in the filmmaker's country: a man pushed to his limits, after all, is liable to crack, as indeed is a society, a people. As William S. Burroughs so aptly put it: "Desperation is the raw material of drastic change." And Crimson Gold is nothing if not a picture about a desperate man. Following a similar structure to Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry—unsurprising, perhaps, given Kiarostami wrote the screenplay for this film, too—it tells the story of Hussein, a pizza-delivery man, detailing the series of small and not-so-small humiliations and injustices that lead him to hold up a jewellery store, shoot a man, and then take his own life, as is so unsentimentally depicted in the film's masterful opening scene. Played by a real-life pizza-delivery man who is also named Hussein—Panahi, like Kiarostami, draws a thin and indistinct line between documentary and fiction—the character wanders from place to place, episode to episode, sometimes actively participating in events and sometimes merely witnessing them. All play some role, however slight, in bringing the film back to its opening scene. As in life, the minutes and minutiae pile up. For Hussein, so do the indignities. Highlights include the second of three visits to the jewellery store, where the jeweller constantly reminds Hussein of his social status in front of Hussein's bride-to-be, and Hussein's delivery of a pizza to a depressed but talkative Iranian man who's just returned from America and now believes Tehran to be a city of lunatics. Screening tomorrow and Wednesday as part of Promised Lands—a remarkable program of five sub-programs that profile cinematic and geopolitical relationships throughout the Indian subcontinent and across to west Asia and the Middle East—Crimson Gold is one of the best films of the past decade and is not to be missed.

Review, 16 January 2010