A Hero (2021)
Review of A Hero / قهرمان , directed by Asghar Farhadi
I’ve been waiting for Farhadi’s A Hero for awhile now, ever since it won the Grand Prix back at Cannes Film Festival. It’s not often since Panahi or Kiarostami to see a director so successful from Iran on the global stage, and he’s been a great source of pride for Iranians and their diaspora. His films, although leaning masculine, touch up the darkest corners of Iranian society while still managing to not get censored by the Iranian government. That, my friends, is such an achievement.
Anyways, I went into this movie particularly blind. I didn’t watch the trailer, and I only knew the basic premise. I didn’t even read any of the early reviews about the movie until after movie, so I think I went in the way I saw Parasite. Parasite I saw in theatres and absolutely loved how blind I went in, but this film particularly I didn’t care for the fact that I went in without any knowledge. That being said, let’s begin this review.
A man jailed for his debt finds a bag full of gold coins while out of jail for two days.
Our main character in A Hero is Rahim, whose secret girlfriend finds a bag full of coins while he’s on a two day break from his sentence. He was jailed for the fact that he couldn’t afford to pay off his debts, so when they find this bag, it seems like all of his problems are solved right then and there.
However, his guilty conscience begins to take over, and he puts out an advertisement to return thee bag and money to its rightful owner. A woman calls in and claims the bag while he has returned to jail, and he is applauded as a hero for his noble action in returning the bag.
The problem here is that he had promised his creditor a payment of 70,000 tomans, thus effectively clearing him of all debts. When he returns the bag and doesn’t have the money, the creditor visits the jail and casts doubt on the fact that Rahim found this bag. That’s when everything starts to get very murky and you really start to question everything going on and wonder what really is the truth.
Someone once described Farhadi’s work as a series of morality plays to me, which makes a lot of sense when you look at his previous work like A Separation and The Salesman. A lot of the women are depicted in a tangent that implies that they have to be connected to a man in order to be relevant to the story, and so a lot of Farhadi’s movies rely on male figures that witness acts of injustice against women.
A Hero goes against this, as a lot of the action tends to fall upon the shoulders of Rahim. But you can argue that his poor family members, especially his sister and son with a speech impediment, all get dragged down with Rahim’s schemes. One of my biggest problems about this movie, however, is that it’s way too long. It runs circles around the same conflict, and relies on the fact that it keeps twisting the story in weird ways.
Not only is that potentially confusing for the viewer, but it also makes it slightly unbearable to watch if you’re not into the movie as much as you should be. I fell into this boat; as everyone kept arguing about the bag and whether this was the truth, I ended up getting really bored with the fact that it’s the same issue being rehashed again and again. I generally have a high tolerance for films like this, but I just couldn’t get into A Hero. Maybe I’m not intellectual enough to understand, I don’t know.
That being said, I did enjoy the movie. I’m giving it a higher rating in this review because it is brilliantly made, and, although it’s not for my taste, I think that someone else would clearly enjoy this movie. It reveals a lot about Iranian society and media attention for something that may or may not be fabricated, which may be insightful to the Western viewer.
The acting is also stellar all-around—there’s almost all completely new faces for a Farhadi film, which is rare considering he tends to recycle the same actors again and again. There’s a point where they all start getting to your head and you wonder who is the good guy and the bad guy, which is what Farhadi is best at. He pulls you into the gray area of morality and has you questioning everything involved.
Overall Thoughts
It just drags on a bit too long, but it’s a wonderful story. It’s something you won’t see in Western cinema because people aren’t jailed for the fact that they can’t pay their debts back to a creditor. There’s a lot of really beautiful shots of everyday life in Iran (it looks like Tehran), and I thought a lot about this one scene where Rahim is just wandering around and traditional Iranian music is playing in the background. If you’re into learning more about Iranian society, this is the movie for you.
