Scenes from two married lives – Weekend
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“Subtraction” by Iranian Mani Haghighi about a couple from Tehran who meet their doubles is being released. Whether it’s a Hitchcockian thriller or magical realism, Haghighi’s film can’t seem to decide what it is, but these scenes of married life are quite entertaining to watch.
As director Mani Haghighi said in an interview, one day during a trip to the border region of Iran, he came across an archival photo from the Iran-Iraq War, which depicted himself, in an army uniform, wounded in the head. There would not be anything particularly strange in this if it were not for the fact that the director did not participate in that war: at the time of the conflict he was a child. From this incident the idea of ”Subtraction” was born. The film begins with Farzaneh, a middle-aged Tehran woman who works as a driving instructor, accidentally seeing her husband Jalal on the street. Having traced his path to an apartment unfamiliar to her, Farzaneh suspects Jalal of treason, but it quickly turns out that this is another person – Mohsen, who is like a twin to her husband. Moreover, Mohsen’s wife, Bita, is an exact copy of Farzaneh herself.
Compared to other world-famous Iranian directors, Mani Haghighi stands out for his interest in genre cinema: his fame was brought to him by the artsy retro-thriller “Here Comes the Dragon” (2016) and the amusing pseudo-horror “Pig” (2018)/. However, in both of these films, Haghighi, who grew up in Canada and was shaped largely by Western cinema, paid tribute to the Iranian tradition of intertwining reality and fiction in the plots and reflecting on the theme of cinema as such. In “Pig,” where in the plot a masked maniac hunts famous Iranian directors, including Haghighi himself, it was not entirely possible to maintain this principle within the framework of charming self-irony, and the picture looked narcissistic to the point of tediousness. So the decision this time to abandon such a reflexive layer was beneficial: the new film is an honest thriller without equivocations.
If we compare “Subtraction” with the works of Haghighi’s compatriots, then first of all it is worth remembering the two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, for whom, by the way, Haghighi starred as an actor in “Ellie’s Story” (2009). How in “The Divorce of Nader and Simin” (2011) and “Secrets of the Past” (2013) by Farhadi, “Subtraction” is about two married couples and the dynamics of relationships within them, about impulsive decisions that lead to irreversible consequences; in the beginning, where Farzaneh suspects treason, it may even seem that Haghighi is filming something epigoneous in relation to his titled colleague. However, after this, the plot takes on a different direction – one that in Hollywood cinema is usually called the elegant term “mindfuck” (that is, let’s say, “puzzle”).
The dramatic principle of “Subtraction” also comes from Hollywood. Another useful untranslatable term to describe it is “high concept”: this is when the plot starts from one fantastic assumption, the question “what if…”. At the same time, the most elegant solution by Haghighi and co-writer Amir Reza Kouhestani is that the duality of the two married couples in the film is not substantiated in any way, but is simply presented as a fact. A seemingly natural explanation in the spirit of Indian musicals about twins separated in childhood is immediately dismissed by the fact that the heroines have different, although close, dates of birth. There is also no question that everything that happens is a hallucination or fantasy of one of the characters, since the film does not have a narrator and the presentation of events is not tied to any of the characters. Haghighi is not interested in mysticism as such, a point that distinguishes his version of magical realism from Denis Villeneuve’s hallucinatory Enemy (2013), another memorable film about doppelgängers.
However, the world in which Haghighi’s film takes place, although not fantastic, is slightly surreal and creepy. The director achieves this effect with a simple technique: in almost every street scene it rains and in most of them the sun is shining at the same time. Attention to this is emphasized in the very first scene, when Farzaneh cannot decide whether to take off her sunglasses. Such consistently strange weather in the frame creates the effect of a dream in which reality seems to be normal, but something is slightly wrong with it. In addition, the rains refer to classic Hollywood film noirs with their oppressive atmosphere and twisted plots.
The development of the story in “Subtraction” also has to be closely followed: the obvious difficulty of a film about doubles for the viewer is that the characters played by the same actors can easily be confused. This problem is partially alleviated by the fact that the scriptwriters have given the two married couples different social backgrounds. Farzaneh and Jalal are proletarians, Mohsen and Bita are middle class, and their clothing and environments vary accordingly (however, Haghighi’s directorial style in this film is rather spare, and little attention is paid to the spaces surrounding the characters). This was done precisely for dramatic convenience, since there are no political or social themes in the film. The actors – Tarane Alidosti and Navid Mohammadzadeh, popular in Iran – cope with the task of playing two roles each; the men are completely opposite to each other in character (Jalal is soft and sympathetic, Mohsen is an aggressive egoist).
But as the lives of the two couples become intertwined, it becomes increasingly difficult to figure out who is who. The effect of confusion was probably intended by the authors. However, at the end of a two-hour film, when you wonder what it was all about, the feeling of understatement is rather disappointing. Perhaps the two married couples should be understood as a metaphor for different aspects of the same family relationship? Or their different stages? Or is there still some kind of political meaning here, indistinguishable to someone who is not immersed in the Iranian context? Anything is possible, and with due diligence, “Subtraction” can be given different interpretations. But there is a feeling that, carried away by his ingenious dramatic construction, Haghighi did not have time to figure out what exactly it was for. So Subtraction remains a good way to spend two hours at the cinema, but the comparisons to Hitchcock that impressionable reviewers awarded it at the Toronto Film Festival are perhaps too flattering for it.
In theaters from 7 September
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