Rosewater

Rosewater is the film Argo should have been but wasn’t. It tells its story without hype or melodramatic fakery. Without the lies Jon Stewart won’t reap Ben Affleck’s box office. But he made by far the better movie. He respected the truth more than the cliches of the blockbuster.

Stewart has a great, moving story. The saga of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari’s 118-day imprisonment records the largely psychological torture he suffered and his personal responses to it. In solitary confinement he summons up the company of his dead father, whom the Shah had imprisoned and — physically — tortured for being a Communist, and his dead rebel older sister Maryam, who’d introduced him to the marvels of Leonard Cohen and the joys of culture and life. As Stewart shoots the film Iran itself — at least, as played by stand-in Amman, Jordan — is infused with a magic realism that reflects the absent powers and spirits in the cityscape. The imaginary life in the city is like that in the cell -- the country is a jail.

To set the political tone, the film opens on an Iranian poem abut a loving world endangered by the new threat to light. The title records the change in the connotation of rosewater, from the piety and warmth the child Maziar associated with it to the sinister insecure “specialist” who wafts it when he interrogates him. Rosewater has shifted from a humanist piety to serve a dehumanizing tyrant. That distills the tragedy of Iran.

The film deflates some common myths about that enemy country. The young airhead infatuated with Ahmadinejad is no famished street urchin brainwashed with chocolates but an educated Brit. Stewart’s strongest point is to distinguish between the Iranian people and their government. The government may be evil — ironically, itself the Great Satan character it projects on America — but the people are warm, spirited, hungry for freedom and for connection to the outside world. The point is concentrated in Maziar’s comic interview on Stewart’s TV show, where he points to a similarity between Iran and America. This of  course convinces Rosewater that Maziar must be a traitor and a spy.

When Maziar inveigles Rosewater with tales of his international massage experiences he exposes not just the Iranian puritan’s hypocrisy but his projection upon the Other — in this case the profane West — his own suppressed desires and shame. The jailor is more frightened than the prisoner — his power belies his vulnerability. 

     Yet Maziar and Stewart remain confident in the future. In the final scene the Iranian security force demolishes the subversive army of satellite dishes. But behind a door a furtive wide-eyed boy with a cell-phone camera bears witness. As the frightened savagery continues another generation of freedom fighter rises from the shadows. Hope springs eternal.