Iranian film reveals tarnished underside of 'Crimson Gold'
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s “Crimson Gold” is an extraordinary film in many ways, the least of which is its unorthodox casting.
Playing the central character of Hussein — a Tehran pizza deliveryman who one day snaps after a series of minor life defeats and subtle insults — is real-life pizza deliveryman Hossain Emadeddin. As is the custom in many Iranian films, Emadeddin is not a professional actor. In this case, however, what adds a charge to his low-key, almost documentary performance is the knowledge that Emadeddin is also, in real life, a paranoid schizophrenic.
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There is no reference to Hussein’s mental health. Yet Emadeddin’s performance, due either to the actor’s medicated state or perhaps to the symptoms of the disease itself, is a marvel of Everyman affectlessness.
The film ends with Hussein. trapped inside a jewelry store by the automatically locking security gate, in the midst of a robbery gone awry. But when we are first introduced to him, we see him as a would-be jewel thief. Increasingly frustrated by the elderly shop owner’s intransigence, Hussein is shown in the climax of a long, static shot lifting his pistol toward the off-screen proprietor and firing. “Crimson Gold” then flashes back to several days earlier in an effort to show what chronologically preceded the crime.
We meet Hussein and his friend Ali (Kamyar Sheisi) in a tea shop, where they are mistaken for pickpockets by a man at the next table (Ehsan Amani) who notices them going through the contents of a woman’s purse that Ali has found, contents that include a broken gold ring. Further indignities pile up. First, the obviously underdressed pair are rebuffed in an attempt to pawn the ring at a jeweler’s. Later, accompanied by Ali’s sister and Hussein’s fiancee (Azita Rayeji), they visit the same store in a vain effort to buy something. At one point, Hussein, attempting to deliver pizzas to an apartment in a tony neighborhood, is detained by police on stakeout. The cops, it seems, are arresting middle-class partygoers as they leave the building for the crimes of dancing, drinking and fraternizing with the opposite sex.
Forbidden to either complete his delivery or leave the scene, Hussein gives his rapidly cooling pizzas away to the officers and their young, Westernized detainees.
In the penultimate scene, Hussein’s travels lead him to the opulent home of a wealthy young man (Pourang Nakhael) who invites the deliveryman in to assuage his loneliness. The contrast between Hussein’s impoverished lifestyle and the swimming pool-equipped and liquor-fueled decadence of his host is stark, and the implied brutality of this societal disparity is meant to signal, if not to trigger, the tragic event that follows.
Panahi’s Tehran is not one we often see in Iranian films. Laced with profanity, it casts an unblinking eye at the place where the haves and the have-nots collide. It is a place where believers and infidels clash, where material temptations tug at spiritual values, where old worlds coexist uneasily with the new, where reality bumps up against idealism, and where the sane and the insane are sometimes indistinguishable.
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