A Hero (2021)

(Amir Jadidi as Rahim in A Hero)

A Hero (2021)

(Now streaming on Amazon Prime Video)

In the breathtaking, austerely beautiful A Hero, from Iran, written and directed by two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, we rarely see the full screen of a cellphone, and even when we do, we get only a glimpse of a face or a video.  Mostly Farhadi relies on the people in the story to tell us what news a cellphone brings, and the same is true of hastily shown TV screens, computers, indeed the entire Internet.  It’s all a vast “out there” that keeps intruding on ordinary people’s lives.

Electronic devices in Farhadi’s Iran are contrivances that suddenly spring to stinging life, like vipers.  They uncoil, bite, and slither away, inflicting wounds that have only an uncertain chance of healing.

Devices and desires insinuate themselves into the story, which centers on handsome, self-effacing Rahim (Amir Jadidi), an imprisoned painter and illustrator who’s given a two-day leave to his hometown of Shiraz. He hopes to use the time off to settle the onerous debt that’s put him behind bars.  Or pay off part of it anyway, enough to free him from prison and convince his creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), that, once released, he’ll work to erase the remaining debt.  His sister Malileh (Maryam Shahdael) and brother-in-law Hossein (Alireza Jahandideh) are committed to helping him.

He’s encouraged because Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), the woman he hopes to marry, has had a stroke of good luck.  She’s found a purse in the street containing 17 gold coins.  Once the couple convert them to cash, they believe they’ll be on the way to paying off a sizeable chunk of Rahim’s debt.

But the coins turn out to be worth less than Rahim and Farkhondeh had thought.  Intriguingly, Rahim doesn’t despair. Instead, unexpectedly, his integrity comes to the fore – and begins his downfall.   He feels he should do the honorable thing and return the gold coins to their rightful owner.  But he can’t reveal that Farkhondeh found the money since they’re not yet officially engaged, and in strict, puritanic Iran that means their relationship must remain secret.

So, Rahim lies and says that he found the purse with the gold coins.  That deception will trip him up.  Maybe through his selfless act he can be forgiven and start a new life with Farkhondeh.  He dutifully plasters posters around town describing the lost purse.  A woman comes forward identifying herself as the owner, and Rahim is proclaimed a hero.  A local charity lauds him as a Samaritan, newspaper and TV interviewers seek him out, and an admiring public chip in to help pay off his debt.

But it’s later revealed that Rahim was in prison when the purse was actually found.  Also, he’s asked if he can personally identify the rightful owner.  No, he can’t.  After his two days off he was required to return to prison, so he had his sister Malileh return the money.  It was she who met with the owner.  Does Malileh know where this woman lives, so she can be questioned?  No.  Malileh didn’t ask the woman for her address.  How, then, can anyone be sure the woman who reclaimed the money is the rightful owner?  Or, worse, could this unreachable woman and Rahim have colluded to keep the money and still win him public favor and thus his release?

At the heart of A Hero lies not just compound debt, but compound doubt.  A troubling question grows in the community’s mind:   In doing what may have seemed the honorable thing, has Rahim actually behaved deceitfully?

Farhadi navigates this twisty moral ground with stunning clarity, formality and smoothness.  Though the movie is edited (by Hayedeh Safiyari) with knife-edge precision, there isn't a shock cut to be found.  Cinematographer Ali Ghazi keeps the scenes stately, human-scaled, never grandiose (except for a wonderful sequence beginning under the opening credits showing a construction site beside colossal rock formations).  The actors don’t seem placed for the camera.   They seem found, stolen upon, ready to conceal or reveal, we’re not sure which.

The acting, too, is pointedly modest.  Jadidi doesn’t endow Rahim with any stiff “dignity”.  He remains a reticent man caught in a predicament of his own devising – and, most paradoxically, with no malice aforethought.  The actor conveys bewilderment and hopelessness with restraint, delicacy and eyes that in seconds can grow wide with dismay or watery and downcast with distress.

(Rahim (Amir Jadidi) in prison in A Hero)

His movements don’t suggest cunning. To the very end, Rahim seems to have a pitiably small amount of guile in him, yet he’s increasingly reviled as his web of deception unravels.  Coupled with Fahardi’s farseeing, magnanimous direction, Jadidi's bodily grace under pressure stitches the movie’s byzantine plot together.

Farhadi’s steady director’s hand gives all the characters an irreducible visual integrity, even when we’re not sure who’s telling the truth.  After the prison honchos allow Rahim to be interviewed on television, are they pleased because they think him honorable, or because on camera he declares that prison officials care about the inmates’ well-being?  Is the charity, in helping Rahim, also burnishing its own image?

Humanity’s mixed motives aside, the most intransigent troublemaker in this tale is social media, where lies can not only be exposed, but be subjected to multiple interpretations, compounded in full public view.  How can someone accused be rightly judged when anyone in his society can have a go at him?  Rahim’s freedom, his fate, isn’t entirely in his own hands.  It comes down to strangers being able to pick his story apart, claim by claim.  Can one man satisfy so many detractors?

For a story with the widest possible social implications, Farhadi directs with spartan assuredness.  He composes shots with almost prosecutorial precision, yet without prejudgment.  No one looks placed, confrontationally, for the camera.  They simply seem to be discovered, spinning out their personal dilemmas.  Which gives us the chance to interrogate them head-on, as if they were in the same room with us.  With little to hide.  Or too much?

Farhadi’s pitying realism suggests that such caginess is true for all of us.  Or we’d do well to assume it is.  If a single lie can get a man denounced, do any of us dare try to be fully honest?  Or do we just keep shifting the beads of truth inside us, hoping none of them need ever completely be exposed to the light?