“Careless Crime”; From the Rex Cinema Fire to Today
“Careless Crime,” Shahram Makari’s fourth feature film, is a continuation of this filmmaker’s previous world that began with his short films—such as “Squirrel Storm”—and shares with us the intellectual concerns of a filmmaker who has mastered the tools of cinema.
If in Squirrel Storm the filmmaker tells us how very small and seemingly insignificant details, when placed alongside each other, can create a catastrophe, then Careless Crime follows precisely this theme and through a puzzle-like narrative tells us how small—and seemingly insignificant—details lead to a heartbreaking catastrophe like the burning of the Rex Cinema in Abadan.
The filmmaker, however, deliberately and consciously does not engage in a direct narrative of the strange burning of this cinema in the years of the revolution, but rather arrives at a narrative that spans forty years—from the time the cinema was burned to today—and reaches a very complex composition of the concept of time, so as to share with us both visible and hidden layers about a not-so-simple occurrence and its dimensions.
The film flows in three different layers: four people who go to burn the cinema; several young people today who come to the cinema to watch a film called Careless Crime; and the film Careless Crime itself, which narrates a strange story about a missile and a screening of a film about deer on top of a mountain near a magical spring.
Of course, all three of these times are inseparably intertwined with each other, and each of these layers easily combines with another so that the filmmaker conveys the most important essence of the film about the concept of time—borrowed from literature—into the language of cinema with endless effort. For this reason, we are faced with Makari’s most complex film, and connecting with it is not at all simple, and even the curious and intelligent viewer must watch the film more than once.
This complexity stemming from self-awareness has expanded with each Makari film, in such a way that each of his four feature films, respectively, has become a more complex work than the previous film. This complexity was best expressed—and proportionately—in “Fish and Cat” and created Makari’s best work—and one of the best works after the revolution—but in “Assault” it became a bothersome complexity that made connection with the film impossible.
In Careless Crime, although in my opinion we are faced with greater complexity than in the film Assault, the filmmaker succeeds in blending this complexity with the life and world of the film and the theme that narrates it, and although self-awareness is still intrusive (and in my opinion the filmmaker needs to allow his instinct more room to maneuver), we are faced with a prominent and daring work that in both form and content wants to go beyond established and conventional well-tested levels and create a world that is not initially bound by the viewer, and instead of trying to bring the audience along, asks them to go through the effort of following the film and strive to discover the film’s various content and formal secrets.
At the very least, we are faced with an extremely different experience that has no parallel or similar example in Iranian cinema.
The filmmaker creates a world that, while speaking about social/political realities, bears no relation to reality. From the first scene, it is the filmmaker himself who hands a mysterious note to the film’s main character, Takbali, and from there disrupts time. Takbali tells Makari (in the role of a pharmacist, whose voice we only hear and whose face we don’t see) that he burned a place four years ago, and Makari asks: forty years ago? This is the beginning of a temporal collapse that continues to the end of the film and shapes the entire film’s world.
In the cinema museum scene, the film’s other screenwriter (Nasim Ahmadpour) plays a woman who leads Takbali to the basement and in fact guides him through a time tunnel to go to the past. In fact, the film’s creators show themselves from the very beginning, and with a kind of distancing, remain storytellers who tell us how to accompany the main character in their time machine and see four decades in a time close to two hours and twenty minutes.
Now the burning of the cinema forty years ago is connected to the threat of burning the cinema that wants to show the film Careless Crime, and ultimately the cinema that is showing Careless Crime catches fire when it reaches the scene related to the deer film (a film that was shown in the Rex Cinema).
Throughout all this, Abdollah Larghobaa, with strange majesty dressed in a puppet costume and with a wooden head, is directing, and in the amazing and prophetic final scene, his index finger points toward a missile that splits the sky. And later, months after the film was completed, we saw how the sky was split.
Source: Radio Farda
