The Charmer

The Charmer is a poignant contribution to the European — indeed, Western — debate on the management of immigration. There are regulations, of course, but there are also basic human needs and aspirations those regulations should be humane enough to accommodate.

Iranian director Milad Alami worked with a Danish co-scriptwriter to detail the damage political systems do to normal human relationships, to reasonable needs and desires. 

Hero Esmail is a charming Iranian man who has come to Denmark in hopes of establishing residency. By day he works as a casual labourer with a moving company. He lives in a cheap tenement so he can send money back to his family. A familiar story.

He earns his (i.e., the film’s) title at night when he trawls the bar scene, picking up one-night stands that he hopes will quickly convert to the formal co-habitation that will satisfy the Danish government and secure his visitors’ status. He’s in one when we meet him, but he moved (“fell in love”) too fast for the woman’s comfort so she dumps him.

The opening scene is mysterious — a blonde woman’s suicide. We eventually learn she left her husband for Esmail. When he wouldn’t marry her she went back to him. After having sex with him she jumped out the window.

As Esmail learns from Lars, the stranger who joins him in the nightly hunt, his exoticism gives him an advantage over the Danish men. Lars’s function is to remind the charmer that his actions are not free from consequences. 

The script carefully frames out his and his family’s religion and any subversive political intentions. He simply wants to get his family a better life. That urge and innocence — and the specious terror it encounters — make this film equally pertinent to the theatre around America’s  Southern border.    

Now the spoiler: Lars is the suicide’s husband, embittered by his loss to what appears to be an unscrupulous exploiter of women. Also, Esmail can’t marry anyone in Denmark because he has a wife and two daughters in Iran, whom he hopes to resettle in Denmark once he establishes himself.

 The rigours of the immigration rules makes him use whatever he can to gain residency. The “charmer” might have been titled the “male prostitute.” Typical embarrassments occur, like neither party being able to bring the date home or a woman’s young son interrupting the act thinking Daddy’s home. The run of coarse love never did smooth true. 

Before we learn Esmail’s marital status we’re rooting for his success with the spirited, Westernized, modern Sara, an Iranian girl studying — unwillingly, “law” — in Denmark. She lives opulently with her mother in the Iranian expatriate community. When that community meet Esmail they reminisce glowingly about the country they fled — and sniff around for signs of his social status. Could he be Afhgani? 

Sara immediately twigs to Esmail’s predicament. “Don’t hit on my friends.”  Later, when she is falling for him: “I won’t marry you just so you can stay here.” But when she decides to marry him it’s for her own escape — from her famous mother — and the all-seeing all-judging portrait of her General father, who — whether living or dead — enabled their comfortable transplant. 

In the perverse morality of government regulation of lives, Esmail is doomed when he falls in love with Sara. “This is not how it was supposed to work.” He can’t just live with her and he can’t marry her so he returns home. 

He has open emotional reunions with his daughters and father-in-law. But there’s an apparently new abyss between him and his wife, who stands apart. “Will you still be my husband?” “If you let me.” The modesty in his response bears the hint of confession, regret, tentativeness, enough to cloud her eyes. To recover his life here he will need more than the charm that took him so far — yet nowhere — in Europe.

The character’s name obviously draws on two literary references. Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, his first, is the patriarch of Islam. Melville’s Ishmael is part of — and our portal into — the madman Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale in Moby Dick. Esmail derives from both, the questor from Melville neutralizing the religious threat from the Bible. Here the great white whale so many seek is the better life democracies have to offer the global oppressed. 
     The defeated Esmail passes his fine suit on to another man, a younger man, for him to deploy when he sells what he has in Europe in hopes of admission. For the exotic we fear is also the exotic we desire. Similarly, the harshness the immigrant faces is less than what he would leave behind.