The considerable beauty of the Iranian film “Djomeh” — with its story of an Afghan immigrant trying to make a romantic connection in a culture that rejects him — lies in its absolute transparency, unforced realism and the compassion of its vision of the world. The film, by Iranian director Hassan Yektapanah, shared the Cannes Festival Camera d’Or prize (for best first feature) with that other remarkable Iranian film, “A Time for Drunken Horses.” Both deserved the honor.
Here is a film that gives you the illusion of eavesdropping on life as it’s actually lived, on people as they actually behave. As we watch this sometimes painful, sometimes amusing story of the lonely but talkative Afghan outsider Djomeh (Jalil Nazari), as scene after scene of ordinary life rolls quietly and serenely by, we lose all sense of the people and landscape (a remote village in the Iranian high country) as being foreign or distant. This is our world, the film suggests, a place of precious gifts or jarring sadness.
The story, at first, seems simplicity itself. Over the course of several days, we watch Djomeh, a 20-year-old Afghan immigrant who works as a milk boy on a local dairy farm, making his daily rounds. We see and hear Djomeh working with the cows, riding in the truck with his taciturn boss Mahmoud (Mahmoud Behraznia), arguing with his fellow immigrant and kinsman Habib (Rashid Akbari), and, increasingly, dropping by the local grocery and supply store to woo the shopkeeper’s daughter Setareh (Mahbobeh Kalili).
Djomeh is refreshingly candid and open, laying bare his feelings without reticence. There is a boyish simplicity in the way he exposes himself to Mahmoud, in his optimism and perseverance — and even in the almost childlike way he courts Setareh, constantly returning to the store to buy supplies he doesn’t need. But, from Mahmoud’s wry responses, and from Habib’s furious rebukes, we gradually see how circumscribed and difficult Djomeh’s position is. He is a second- or third-class citizen, persecuted by the local children, only tolerated by the shopkeeper — and perhaps only barely tolerated by silent, enigmatic Setareh herself.
Though Djomeh doesn’t see himself that way, he is a victim of prejudice. And his story, while never obviously preachy, is a clear demonstration of how prejudice operates quietly but openly, in ordinary lives.
Unlike Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s searing “Kandahar,” “Djomeh” does not damningly examine the plight of Afghan refugees or people; nor is it an expose of the tyranny of the old fallen Afghan regime. Indeed, Djomeh didn’t flee his country to escape persecution but after being disgraced by an affair with an older woman.
Working from two great models, the Italian postwar neo-realists (Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti) and his own mentor-teacher Abbas Kiarostami (also the mentor of “Drunken Horses'” Bahman Ghobadi), Yektapanah has a style of such self-effacing purity that you may not notice this film’s artfulness until a second viewing. Both Yektapanah and Ghobadi were Kiarostami’s assistant directors on his Cannes Palme d’Or-winning “Taste of Cherry”; anyone who has seen “Cherry” will be reminded of it by this film’s many scenes of people conversing in a moving van, one axis-swiveling reaction shot succeeding another. But “Djomeh” may strike some audiences as even more real than Kiarostami’s work, because the story is so luminously open. Watching it, we enter, without barriers, a world.
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“Djomeh” ((star)(star)(star)) opens Friday at Facets Multimedia, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave.; 773-281-4114. Running time: 1:27. No MPAA rating (family). Farsi, subtitled.
