It’s a summer evening in Tehran, and the streets of the Iranian capital are lively. A young creative couple, an actor and a dancer, coolly take in a performance from a band of street musicians. “This country is so full of artists,” the man, Ali (Farzad Karen), says to Hanna (Hana Mana). She replies warily: “Let’s see if they stay like this.”
The remark is delivered casually in Maryam Ataei and Hossein Keshavarz’s stirring new film The Friend’s House Is Here, sprinkled in between airy banter and snippets of various rehearsals, but it’s no trivial matter. Under Iran’s theocratic regime, creative expression is a risky and unstable endeavor. The government tightly polices the contents of all art – visual works, theater, music, film, literature – for strict adherence to state ideology. Failure to receive a permit could result in fines, imprisonment or banishment. The colorful characters amiably populating this loose, organic film, played by a collective of real-life underground artists and improv actors, are liable to be harassed, fined, arrested or disappeared at any moment.
So, too, were the film-makers, who operated without government permission, necessitating all outdoor scenes to be recorded in one or two takes to avoid arrest. Their defiant 96-minute film, whose cast were denied visas to attend its Sundance premiere, was still in post-production when the regime enforced a near-total internet blackout to damper nationwide protests, forcing the crew to smuggle it out of the country.
All of this looms uneasily and implicitly over the proceedings, flickering beneath its scenes of group conviviality and frequent use of an unspecified, ominous “they”. But The Friend’s House Is Here is far from dour, suspicious or even expressly political. This is, against great odds and surely some western expectations, a beguiling hangout film – an invitation to the dinner party, a fascinating window into a group of underground artists who carry on despite the risks, a representation of creativity under surveillance. A snapshot of everyday resistance, the fight for a freedom from the bottom up.
And most effectively, a moving portrait of one nutritive, symbiotic friendship in transition. Pari (Mahshad Bahram), an art gallerist by trade and an underground dramatist by heart, and Hanna, the dancer, are the type of roommates who bleed into each other despite their differences – the former more structured and practical, the latter, with her Marilyn Monroe bob and pearls, a flashy, chaotic bohemian. The film takes an unusually elliptical approach to their entanglement, tossing neatly constructed snippets of their intimacy – painting each other’s nails, dashing through the streets, mutually mocking a woman who shames their lack of hijabs – like breadcrumbs. Bahram and Mana, both one degree away from their characters in real life, slip naturally into the duo’s breezy, syncopated rhythm; the women are never more compelling than with each other.
Still, the pace of these slice-of-life vignettes is so relaxed as to seem at times stuck in a holding pattern – though that is, to be fair, true to the experience of the characters, whose ambitions are curbed within the many limbos of oppressive governance. Hanna waits for a visa to France; Pari works within an illegal underground. It’s an “uncertain time”. Every creative breakthrough is also a risk, all within a recurring visual motif of purgatory – disorientingly white spaces, repeated compositions, cameras circling around the characters. The latter slyly invokes the omnipresent specter of state surveillance, as does the film’s habit of lulling the viewer with informal, imprecise small talk, only to disorient them with a confusing jump-cut (is this real or imaginary? Flashback or flash forward?). More than once, I found myself lost, looking for guidance where there is none.
But holding patterns eventually break. The rupture – without spoiling too much, an arrest – comes suddenly and quietly and perhaps too late, as it invigorates the at times too baggy meanderings with acute purpose, and infuses the central relationship with real, pressing questions. (Most distressing: stay, or leave?) Still, The Friend’s House is Here resists over-structuring its political critique; the high drama of incarceration and state-inflicted trauma are the subject of a different film (perhaps, say, exiled auteur Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, nominated for two Oscars this year). Instead, Ataei and Keshavarz remain doggedly focused on the smallest units of community and acts of care under authoritarianism, the softness, vitality and uncelebrated expressiveness of Persian people so rarely afforded view to western audiences.
The film’s clear-eyed optimism – that at the very least, there is still creative joy and community to be found on the margins – feels bittersweet, as the regime continues its brutal crackdown on protesters that is now estimated to have killed more than 5,000 people, many of them similarly young, restless and idealistic. At the film’s Sundance premiere, Keshavarz choked up as he revealed that an ensemble actor from the film had recently been shot in the face by authorities, and risked losing vision in their eye. These unceremoniously heroic characters, one imagines, would be out there, too – keeping the light for each other, looking toward a better future.
The Friend’s House is Here is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
