Our review of Leila and Her Brothers: The Clan of Iranians

After the relentless thriller Tehran Lawthe young Iranian director Saeed Roustaee returns with a radically different film, Leila and her brothers. This family fresco of 2h39 (which would have benefited from being a little tighter) shows an incredible sense of the image and the spectacular. From the first scenes, the film captures its audience and won’t let go. Three sequences intertwine masterfully.

Saeed Roustaee begins his film by delicately approaching his camera to a solitary old man, Esmail, who is smoking a cigarette in the sun. This shrewd patriarch with a plaintive gaze goes to a place of prayer to talk to his cousins ​​whom he admires but who do not return this naive veneration to him, to say the least.

Pitiful Harpagon

Sudden change of scene with the second action which plunges into the heart of a metallurgical factory in full effervescence. Hundreds of employees wearing yellow helmets refuse to leave the premises as the company has just been brutally shut down. A demonstration is improvised in a great wind of disorderly violence.

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At the heart of the hurricane, one of the four sons of Esmail (played aptly by Navid Mohammadzadeh), beats a retreat and returns home pitifully. The third scene filmed in parallel introduces Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti, as beautiful as it is touching), the only daughter in the family, to a massage parlour. She gives way to her tears as if she had already understood the ins and outs of the simmering drama.

Leila, a brilliant and sacrificial woman, dedicated her life to her parents and her four brothers. Affected by the Iranian economic crisis, they are crumbling under debt and tearing themselves apart over the various disillusions encountered by each in this dysfunctional family. In order to get them out of the rut, Leila hatches a plan to buy a boutique to start a business with all of her brothers. Everyone puts their meager savings into it. However, they lack one last financial support…

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It could come from their father Esmail, devoured by the desire for glory, and who against all odds promised a large sum of money to his cousins ​​in order to become their new godfather, the highest distinction of Persian tradition. Give to his family or to the clan? The question will lead the family to the brink of implosion. Without forgetting that the health of the patriarch, pitiful Harpagon is deteriorating.

After Jafar Panahi and Asghar Farhadi, the formidable cinematographic talent of Saeed Roustaee asserts itself. There is Visconti and Woody Allen in this choral film which gradually turns into a social chronicle. The director pays the same scrupulous attention to all his characters. Each is impeccably camped, with its qualities and its faults. The verbal battles are particularly sharp within this siblings who tell each other everything to better reconcile afterwards. They do not eclipse the moments of complicity between the four brothers and the sister. Staged with damn fierce incandescence, Leila and her brothers turns out to be a powerful and endearing family portrait.