Teenage rebellion in Tehran
An innocent dare lands a young girl in trouble in director Sadaf Foroughi’s debut
AVA Starring Mahour Jabbari. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Rated PG
2What in Hollywood might
serve as the setup for a mindless teen comedy—girl makes bet with friends about dating a boy— turns into a nightmare in Tehran-set Ava. In fact, don’t be surprised if the relentless tension and the tightening grip of repression on its high-school heroine bring to mind extremely removed experiences—like watching the East German–set The Lives of Others or reading 1984.
The effect speaks to the artistic powers of first-time IranianCanadian filmmaker Sadaf Foroughi, who shows a strong cinematic eye—the title heroine (Mahour Jabbari) seems always boxed in behind windows and doorways. Foroughi also displays an amazing knack for building pressure and momentum out of small domestic conflicts. Try not to cringe in the scene where Ava attempts a secret— and in this world, unspeakably dangerous—phone call while her mother is in the shower. That Foroughi was somehow allowed to shoot this politically volatile film in Tehran makes things all the more fascinating.
You’ll find Ava’s teen rebellion achingly familiar; she’s a wallflower trying to stand out by wearing a red backpack and matching Chuck Taylor All Stars with her dour school uniform. Her bet is so innocent it only requires her to go to the boy’s house— but it brings the fist of authority down on her in a society obsessed with keeping girls pure. At school, fuelled by the snitches they encourage, the teachers start searching her bag and interrogating her. At home, irate that she may have been with a boy alone, Ava’s mother drags her daughter to the gynecologist, cuts her off from her friends, and threatens to take away her violin. It’s the mother’s actions that are most distressing here— because Foroughi makes it clear she thinks she’s doing it out of care (not to mention regret for her own past mistakes).
We’re terrified for Ava, but what comes through, despite her few words, is the character’s strength and courage; it’s a gripping, steely performance, complex and smart in a way you don’t often see teen girls portrayed—anywhere. But coming of age, depicted so enthusiastically in North American films, is intensely painful here. For this girl in Iran, it feels more like facing up to a life sentence. > JANET SMITH
THE GIRL IN THE FOG Starring Toni Servillo. In Italian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
2The girl of the title doesn’t have
a dragon tattoo. She’s not really even a character in this Italian thriller, in which a redheaded kid goes missing during the very first scene. But it does borrow heavily from the Scandinavian style of murder mystery, mostly concerned with mood and the darker twists of human intellect.
This entertaining, mist-enshrouded outing is a directorial debut for Donato Carrisi, who has written a number of best-selling detective novels, with The Girl in the Fog a big enough hit to land him his own distribution deal. The finished product gets high marks for style and cleverness, although both feel heavily drawn from familiar sources, right down to the scale model of the tiny alpine town where this takes place. It manages to evoke both Twin Peaks and The Grand Budapest Hotel, with a soupçon of Se7en and a glint of The Shining. Oh, and the fur hats from Fargo.
Things initially focus on The Great Beauty’s stoical Toni Servillo as his Det. Vogel arrives in the Tyrolean burg of Avechot to investigate the abovementioned disappearance. Vogel (meaning “bird” in German) is better known for TV grandstanding than for solving cases. His biggest operation, involving someone dubbed the Mutilator, was a notable bust. Anyway, this isn’t Vogel’s first trip to the mountains; he’s just had a nighttime car accident, and local cops have taken him to the office of Dr. Flores (Jean Reno), a psychologist who prompts him to explain what happened.
That’s where the time-jumping story shifts toward Loris Martini ( The Best of Youth’s Alessio Boni), a recent urban transplant lumbered with a moody teenage daughter, a straying wife, and a whole load of debt. He teaches literature at the only high school, and therefore knew the missing girl, who comes from a family of religious fanatics. His becoming a prime suspect doesn’t stop him from giving Dostoyevskian lectures to his students about the role of evil in fiction.
The new filmmaker himself teaches genre writing at a Milan university, and here he implies that pulp fiction is the only kind of literature that matters. Fortunately, he broadens the story toward more general observations about the connections between cops, criminals, and the voracious media. Still, at more than two hours in length, side characters come and go abruptly, and it gets somewhat bogged down in false endings and narrative twists that are more fun than convincing. Would older inhabitants of this closed world really forget that they had a serial killer in their midst a few decades earlier? Well, it is pretty foggy in Avechot. > KEN EISNER
THE BRIDGE A documentary by George Orr. Rating unavailable
2Saturday, June 17, marks the 60th
anniversary of one of the worst construction disasters in Canadian history. On that date in 1958, temporary supports holding a major section of the Second Narrows bridge collapsed, killing 18 workers outright and claiming the life of a diver the next day.
This year’s remembrance also sees the debut of The Bridge, an hourlong feature re-creating the event and its aftermath. Though directed by doc veteran George Orr, it is really the life’s work of engineer Peter Hall, a transplanted Brit now living on Vancouver Island. Back then, he was a 26-yearold draftsman working his first gig for the Dominion Bridge Company, and was somewhat randomly tasked with documenting the massive undertaking. That meant getting to know many of the 79 ironworkers on the job and treading the girders with them—with nary a safety harness in sight—in order to capture all major developments, from drawing board to final opening.
The novice cameraman arrived late the morning of the collapse, and so didn’t shoot it (or worse). The bridge was repaired and completed, obviously, but 3,000 feet of 16mm film were literally shelved, with tin canisters staring at Hall for almost six decades. Over the years, as he quietly explains on-screen, he asked Dominion and others if they could do something with the footage, and got no takers until Orr signed on.
The results are better suited to local television than to movie theatres. Bad lighting, uneven sound, atrocious typography, and needless repetition dominate its aesthetics, stitched together with the kind of industrial-film narration that used to sell detergent and nuclear power. In a weird way, that’s okay, since these stale-dated ingredients inadvertently help The Bridge capture a bygone era, when Canada was a raw, largely anglophone place, then under new construction.
In any case, Hall’s footage—burnished by time but still lively with rich, rose-hued colours—is unfailingly gorgeous. It does credit to the men who lived and died on the project, subsequently renamed the Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing (not in common parlance, regardless of what CBC great Rick Cluff insists here). But the movie best comes to life at the very end, when the talking stops and snippets of his material are married to a Stompin’ Tom Connors song recalling the event. > KEN EISNER