Father Knows Best
The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Directed by Mohammad Rasoulof
By Charlie Bertsch
Mohammad Rasoulof’s film The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a remarkable achievement.
The Iranian family drama is set against the backdrop of the protests that swept the country in the fall of 2022 after Mahsa Amini, a young woman from the Kurdish region near the border with Iraq, died in police custody after being arrested for wearing her hijab improperly.
One of the finalists for the Academy Award for Best International Feature – nominated by Germany, despite the fact that it was made in Iran – the film begins right after Iman, the head of the household, has been promoted to the position of Investigating Judge in the feared Islamic Revolutionary Court, tasked with prosecuting critics of the state.
His wife Namjeh welcomes the news, particularly since they will be able to move to a bigger place, noting that their daughters Rezvan and Sana – a university and high-school student respectively – are too old to be sharing a room.
The family goes out for a celebratory dinner, during which the couple finally inform their children what kind of work their father does, explaining that they will need to be more careful in the future, since judges are targets.
Although Rezvan and Sana initially appear to understand the situation, it is clear that the protests excite them. We see them watching posts about them on their phones.
After Rezvan’s friend Sadaf is shot in the face by police during a demonstration, she brings her to the family’s apartment. Namjeh is furious when she finds out, insisting that Sadaf must leave as soon as possible. Yet she consents to treat the young woman first, laboriously extracting pellets from her wounds in a close-up sequence that is extremely hard to watch.
Sadaf disappears into police custody soon afterwards, leading Rezvan and Sana to enlist Namjeh’s help locating her, while continuing to keep Iman in the dark. By the time Namjeh explains to her husband what has happened, his daughters have become extremely critical of the regime to which he has devoted his professional life.
Iman’s authority as head of the household turns brittle because he loses the respect of his daughters. Even his wife, who is more willing to go through the motions of obedience, eventually comes to doubt him.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig restages the political upheaval that swept Iran after Amini’s death on a personal level. Just as the nation’s theocratic regime experienced a legitimation crisis in the wake of the protests, so does Iman in his own household.
This crisis is also enacted on a formal level.
Because we see Namjeh, Rezvan, and Sana inside the family’s apartment, their hair is not covered. While this is realistic, the point of forcing women to wear hijabs is to prevent strangers from seeing them like this.
In other words, the camera performs the voyeuristic function that the policies of the Iranian regime are intended to thwart. And indeed the filmmakers are being prosecuted by the regime for exposing women to the gaze in this manner.
This family drama in The Seed of the Sacred Fig makes for very effective storytelling, counterbalancing the documentary footage that Rasoulof shows in the film with granular detail that powerfully reinforces its impact.
It also happened to be the only way that the director could make the film, since he had recently been released from prison and could not afford to be seen shooting on location. Under the circumstances, only the intimate scale of a private household was viable.
This has the fortuitous side effect of giving the film the feel of one of Yasujiro Ozu’s classic films like Tokyo Story, only within an explicitly political frame.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig shows how the reactionary patriarchy promoted by the Iranian regime can end up weakening the authority of actually existing fathers.
Iman has become a stranger in his own house.
Even before he begins his new position, it is clear that he no longer has a close relationship with his daughters.
At the dinner to celebrate his promotion, his daughters ask Iman to do a trick he presumably used to perform for them when they were younger. They are nostalgic for a time when he played a bigger role in their lives.
Later, after the many arrests associated with the protest movement force him to work very long hours, Namjeh pleads with him to try to reconnect with the girls.
But by the time they manage to have dinner as a family, the divide between them has widened so much that their respective outlooks have almost nothing in common.
While The Seed of the Sacred Fig certainly lends itself to figurative interpretation, its depiction of family life is sufficiently concrete to avoid heavy-handed allegory.
Yes, Iman’s increasingly desperate effort to control his wife and daughters overlaps with the Iranian regime’s policing of femininity. But they are not to blame for his plight. It’s the pressure of his new job that eats away at his sanity.
When Iman is handed a massive case file he doesn’t have time to examine, yet told that he must approve the recommended sentence regardless, he resists. Even though his position is supposed to grant him more authority, he ends up with less.
Iman’s new title of Investigating Judge proves to be deeply ironic, since he is neither supposed to investigate nor make judgments of his own.
Although The Seed of the Sacred Fig has been widely praised, some have complained that the family conflict develops too rapidly.
What this criticism fails to comprehend is that the protest movements serve as a catalyst.
Just as an automobile accident can trigger a chain reaction, so can the collision between young women who are tired to having to hide their femininity and a state insistent on policing it. This is why The Seed of the Sacred Fig must take the form of a melodrama.
Left to his own devices, Iman would probably have continued to be the caring father Rezvan and Sana remember, the one we see cheerfully interacting with them in an old home movie.
The rupture in his household occurs because it crashes into circumstances beyond the family’s control. That’s why the final sequence of The Seed of the Sacred Fig calls to mind Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining.
Like Jack Torrance, Iman is a man possessed. And like Jack Torrance, his possession eventually turns him against his family.
It’s a deeply upsetting tale, with disturbing implications for a world in which freedom is under attack around the world.
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Screenshot courtesy of Mohammad Rasoulof. All rights reserved.