Septembers Of Shiraz

Synopsis: A wealthy Jewish jeweller, Isaac Amin (Adrien Brody), living in Tehran at the time of the overthrow of The Shah is arrested for his associations with the old regime.

After playing an Australian in his previous film, the blink-and-you’ve-missed-it crime thriller, Backtrack, and now this film directed by Wayne Blair and lensed by Warwick Thornton, a pairing that was hugely successful with the 2012 Antipodean musical, The Sapphires, Adrien Brody must be reconsidering his association with the land Downunder. Not that he doesn’t give a good performance in what is for him an atypically physically demanding role and not that the film isn’t a well-turned production. It’s just that one can’t help but wonder why one is watching it.

Although it purports to be based on true events (it was adapted from a novel by Dalia Sofer based on her own experience escaping Iran after the revolution), the treatment is thoroughly generic. Given the evident effort gone to, one keeps waiting for some raison d’être of historical and cultural specificity or, failing that, some universal human drama to emerge but such things never eventuate.

Instead we are treated to repeated bouts of Isaac being humiliated and tortured by Revolutionary Guards wearing hoods in low-lit interrogations while his wife, Farnez (Salma Hayek-Pinault), bravely defends his innocence to her longtime servant (Shohreh Aghdashloo) who is being politicized by her ratbag son (Navid Navid).

The trouble with even this is that whilst Isaac’s captors are depicted as opportunistic thugs there is really no attempt by screenwriter Hanna Weg to make Isaac a character deserving of our sympathy. Whichever way you cut it, he evidently made his fortune through his cultivating of the former American-backed regime (whose extensive record of human rights abuses is well attested).  No-one would wish his treatment on him, but such is the nature of revolution, which as we know is always about the forced redistribution of wealth.  There is an attempt to develop a moral and psychological bond between Isaac and his hooded interrogator (Alon Aboutboul) but this never achieves much dramatic heft. Similarly, there is only scene in which Hayek-Pinault ever looks less than poised as her privileged world collapses around her. Remarkably, given what we are seeing, it feels like there is little at stake as each new development resolves itself in some familiar and inconsequential way.  

Perhaps the novel had the depth missing here but in the absence of any compelling drama or historical insight, one is left with the always-watchable Brody in what feels like an over-inflated footnote to a much bigger story.

FYI: The film’s title, which is also that of Sofer's novel, is never explained but refers to the city of Shiraz and the happier times that the Amins enjoyed before the revolution stripped them of their wealth).

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