Is it okay to like a movie more for the conditions and context in which it was made than for the movie itself? I open with this question because I'm not actually sure of the answer. Ideally, a movie's success or failure should be judged based on its attributes as a film, with the context and conditions playing a strong role in supporting this outcome. As it is, there is so much about My Tehran For Sale that pushes negative buttons in me as a filmgoer that I am not at all convinced of its merits as a piece of cinema. It flashes forward and backward in time as a way to temper all the movie's joyous moments with a hint of "but soon it will all go terribly wrong... bet you're wondering how, right?" This is one of my largest narrative pet peeves, as it comes off as nothing but the laziest way to foreshadow some impending doom. Worse, these moments are occasionally completely baffling -- leading to an ending in which I only understood what had happened after I pieced it together on my way home. And I don't mean this in a thematic, rolling over of ideas and suppositions, or even that the movie ends on a kind of cliffhanger, simply that the plotting was so poorly executed that I had to put much of the fragmented pieces together myself. To add to this, many of the emotionally revelatory moments are more like the audience being told how to feel than something that wells up naturally from the characters. This lack of emotional resonance and clarity is surprising, considering Moussavi is apparently one of Iran's most well-regarded poets. Much of the metaphorical and poetical devices of the film are the least successful parts. And, for a movie that is such a relentless downer, it's actually the happy moments that feel the most genuine.
But after all that, I am still goint to hesitantly suggest that the ideas this movie posits are ones that bear telling. Filmed in secret and completely illegal, it is the least veiled critique of the Iranian government I've seen. In many ways it feels like a check list of ways the government's oppression hurts the people, from police crackdowns on parties and inter-sex mingling to a complete dearth of options for those unfortunate enough to be infected with sexually-transmitted diseases to suppression of underground artistic expressions to to to... But many of these things, especially the frightening way STDs can be spread without anyone ever knowing it (one of the characters discovers it only because they're trying to get a Visa to be married and immigrate out of the country) and the lack of sex-related health care once it is discovered. So, I don't know, each of these moments would seem very rote, preachy and clumsily handled in an American movie. But because it was expressing these things in a place in which they are far less talked about, it seemed somehow fresh and possibly important? I don't know, the act of writing this may have talked me out of these feelings and maybe even made me feel that I am engaging in my own form of exoticism. To be somehow surprised that many of these problems that we still don't quite know how to handle in America would exist and be even more problematic in somewhere like Iran. Yeah, I don't know, maybe the movie's not even so good as to kinda recommend it.
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