Today

Reza Mirkarimi’s film has a bifocal address, to her beleaguered Iranian compatriots and to the outside world. 

To us the film says Don’t believe the headlines. Iran is a society of people who can care for each other. We’re not callous murderers bent on world destruction but ordinary humans, capable of generosity and kindness. 

That’s the story of cabbie Youness. In a pre-title scene, he reveals his extraordinary integrity when he orders a corrupt lawyer out of his cab, forgoing the fare. 

At the end of his working day Youness picks up a woman, Siedighah, who’s pregnant, incoherent and beaten up. For her honor’s sake she doesn’t want the shame of going in alone, so he takes her in. He becomes increasingly involved in her case, even as he periodically checks in with his wife. He pays what the hospital requires. Out of integrity he disqualifies himself from insurance reimbursement. After the woman dies in delivery — from previous beatings — he steals her file — and takes her baby girl to raise.

Youness is silent. He says nothing to disabuse the hospital personnel of their assumption he is her husband — and beater. He quietly suffers their abuse — even when he’s knocked down by an angry doctor after his supposed wife’s death. This is the true Iranian, silent, generous, not the impression we get from the bellicose windy ayatollahs. We should avoid leaping to conclusions when we read what seem like obvious signs. Here the nuclear threat is reduced to a night guard’s joke: “Is it a centrifuge?” Youness is wounded, having apparently lost a leg in the Iraq war. 

To Iranians the film has another message. Like that crippled veteran the hospital has fallen from its glory days when its heavy use made it well funded and well equipped. Now it barely makes do. Patients with special needs have to be taken elsewhere. A poster reads “We need more midwives.”

There’s also the sense of a patriarchal sexist and cruel society that Iran needs to emend.  As the matron tells the apparent wife-beater, “Here is a paradise for men like you.” “You take better care of your car,” a guard says. Even when the matron has deduced he was only the woman’s cabbie she stays suspicious: “What’s in it for you?” She scolds a fill-in: “You let others not answer for their responsibility.” 

The matron herself seems to perpetuate the suppression of women. Her curt treatment of her little daughter contrasts to Youness’s warm exchange with the girl. He finds her numbed. She doesn’t like to do anything and goes nowhere. Clearly the society needs a massive effort to help itself. There’s an urgency in the film’s title: Today! 

They’re like the little bird that took a beakfull of water to put out a forest fire. But that also describes the tired cabbie’s reflexive engagement in a stranger’s life and his heroic generosity. He’s a fixer, whether it’s his broken side-mirror or the new baby’s life. But even the huge thing he does is small in the face of the nation’s internal problems.

Youness wanders into forbidden territory when he roams through the hospital storeroom. That provides his escape route when he again breaks the law to steal the file and child. When the laws are inhumane and restrictive justice lies in their violation. The government may reject that principle for its citizens but they advance it in world affairs.