THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

It has been widely reported that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was made in secret, and that is the first thing we see in the film, white text on a black background: This film was made in secret. There is a second line on that title card, though, something that will stick with me for a while: When there is no way, a way must be made.

A way was certainly made by writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who made this film in Tehran, shortly before he was sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging, a fine, and confiscation of his property. He had already faced legal troubles from the Iranian regime for previous films, dating back to 2010. He has since fled the country, a painstaking journey that took 28 days but allowed him to be present at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. As far as I can gather from extremely limited information online, Rasoulof’s wife (Rozita Hendijanian) and child are still in Iran.

People love to use the word “brave” to describe all manner of involvement in art, and particularly in film. Anyone be hard pressed to outmatch Rasoulof when it comes not just to his dedication to art and craft, but the use of art to speak truth to power—something we rarely see employed to the same degree in America, though we may see more of it here soon. It’s unlikely Rasoulof used The Seed of the Sacred Fig as any kind of allegory for where the U.S. is headed, but it’s difficult not to make the comparisons as American audiences. This kind of fascism is very much the direction in which we are headed, which is also stepping in the direction of theocracy.

Iran, of course, is already there, and Rasoulof pulls of an astonishing accomplishment with The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Just knowing the entire film was made in secret puts everything we see onscreen in a different light, as none of it looks like a film made with any such constraints. This includes several scenes of characters driving through Tehran streets, and I kept wondering how he could have mounted cameras on the vehicles without looking conspicuous.

There are so many things I love about this film, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps with the title itself, which, after the initial title card, the film offers a brief explanation: the “sacred fig” is a species that wraps itself around another tree and gradually strangles it to death, until it can stand on its own. This is a symbol of the story to follow, which centers around a family of four: regime-loyal parents Iman and Najmeh (Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani, respectively) and their much more progressive and idealistic teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively).

This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance. Iman has been working as a government “investigator,” then given a promotion, in a new job where he is asked to approve sentencing with no time to actually review the cases. He starts with some level of indignity but ultimately an inability to shed his dedication to this government; Najmeh can only tell him it’s his job so it’s what he has to do. They spend a lot of time giving what appear to outsiders to be clear oppressors the benefit of the doubt. Rezvan and Sana respond to increasingly violent government crackdowns on student protests with the healthy skepticism of their youth.

It’s when Rezvan’s friend from school gets mixed up in a violent clash with police at a school demonstration, and she is brought to this family’s home to dress her wounds, that things get thorny. Najmeh does this only begrudgingly, having already spent a great deal of time admonishing her daughters to be extremely careful about their associations and their public behavior as a reflection of their father in his new position. This friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), maintains her innocence, that she just happens to have been outside her dorm when the police attacked, and so Rezvan maintains the same, to the last. Rasoulof never makes explicitly clear whether Sadaf and Resvan really are “innocent,” perhaps because it doesn’t matter.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 protests in Iran, and Rasoulof’s editor, Andrew Bird, who did his work after the footage was smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, pointedly cuts in real footage of some very distressing violence in the government crackdown. Much of it just feels chaotic and without direction; several show some pretty shocking images. The characters in the film are divided in a way presumably many families in Iran were: parents taking television news at their word; younger people watching clips online posted by protesters.

The plot takes a very specific turn, quite a while into the film, when Iman’s gun goes missing. This is a pistol lent to him by a colleague as self-defense against oppositional forces already known to find and publish the home addresses of judges and associates hauntingly down clearly unjust convictions and sentences. The disappearance of this gun sows distrust between all four members of this family, and serves as a kind of central mystery to the story: what happened to this gun? Which one of them took it? For some time, I was convinced Iman, over-stressed by his job, just left it somewhere he forgot. Of course, things get much more complicated than that.

All of this political unrest serves as the backdrop for this conflict, which becomes the—pardon the pun—trigger point for what might finally, truly tear them apart. Iman can’t imagine any of the three of them taking his gun from him, but is effectively forced to regard all three of them as suspects in the matter. And when the inevitable happens and they have to flee their home due to their address getting shared online, conflicts come to a head between the four of them in a secluded house far outside the city.

This was the one stretch of The Seed of the Sacred Fig where I disengaged slightly, as the narrative shifts to something closer to a conventional thriller than the dense story and plotting that led up to it. In the end, the conflict shifts to the patriarch against all the women, which also feels (rightfully) pointed. I do love that Rasoulof has made a film where all of empathies, and nearly all of its depicted perspectives, lie with the three women central to the story.

Then, the “climactic” sequence involves an extended foot chase through some desert ruins, which went on long enough for me so start wondering what exactly we’re doing here. This was the only point in the film where I felt some cutting for time would have been fine, even as I can acknowledge that Rasoulof might very well have had specific intention with how he dwells on wife and mother, daughters and sisters all running in panicked, labyrinthine circles around the man trying to dictate their lives. I felt slightly ambivalent about the very end, but not enough to move how deeply impressed I am by this film overall.

We should all be spending more time hearing the voices of women like these.

Overall: A-

FLOW

Directing: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A+
Animation: A+

I’m not sure I can adequately explain how much I loved this movie. Flow is not just the best animated film of the year by a mile, it’s within striking distance of being the best film of the year overall. Critics love to throw around the word “triumph,” but here it legitimately applies. This is a film that transcends any cliché.

There are so many impressive things about Flow, it can be difficult to decide where to begin. How about the animation: Latvian director and co-writer Gints Zilbalodis, and his team, rendered the gorgeous animation entirely with the open-source software Blender. He also never makes clear what created the specificity of the world presented therein, with its undercurrent of haunting melancholy which is still somehow also beautiful: the characters in Flow are all feral or wild animals, inhabiting a world once inhabited by humans, recently even, but we never see any. The closest to a human character we see is a humanoid statue, and beyond that, the remnants of artistic carvings left inside a house that a cat has been using for shelter.

We never get any indication that the cat ever knew the human who once lived in that house, although we see wood carvings of cats mid-project, evidently abandoned. Finished cat carvings, most only slightly bigger than the live cat we follow in Flow, dot the yard in font of the house, right down to the bank of a passing river. The human artist was apparently quite obsessive about cats: we briefly see a cat statue so huge it has scaffolding around it.

This live cat is the closest thing Flow has to a protagonist. It encounters other animals, some more than once, but the cat is the only animal we always follow: from the opening scene of it considering itself in the reflection of the river water, to the closing scene of it doing the same. In between those bookends, we discover that there is a cyclical nature to either the world’s climate or its geology—or both—wherein the area floods to a massive degree, and then after several days, the water recedes. The cat moves to different areas of higher ground after getting swept away by a massive flood which is then followed by steady water rise, until it is trapped atop the aforementioned giant cat statue.

A drifting sailboat luckily passes by, and the cat manages to make its way onto it. Much of Flow is spent with the cat on this wooden boat, which already has another animal on it: a capybara. Over time, a sort of team of animals amasses on the boat: a ring-tailed lemur; a secretarybird; a yellow Labrador Retriever; eventually the rest of the pack of dogs that Lab has been running with—which, of course, complicates the group dynamic on the boat.

Unlike other animated films of this sort, there is no dialogue in Flow: none of the animals talk. This is an excellent choice. They do, however, make vocalizations, which are used to flesh out a personality, of sorts, for each animal. With only one exception, recordings of the species’s actual vocalizations were used for each animal we see in this film. Only the capybara stands apart, as the recordings they got from one at a zoo did not work well for the capybara’s personality in this film, so they used a baby camel’s sounds instead.

These choices make Flow particularly stand apart from films like WALL-E, which is basically a silent film in its first half but introduces cartoon humans in its second half; or Bambi, which 80 years ago innovated natural-world movements in animation but still featured talking animals. To be clear, Flow does anthropomorphize its animals, a reasonable choice as otherwise we’d just be watching a bunch of adorable animals drown or get eaten. It must be stressed, however, how subtly Zilbalodis does this: each of the animals move and vocalize only the way their species actually does in the real world. And then, the secretarybird and even the cat are using the rudder to steer the sailboat for some time before it even registers that’s what’s happening.

There is no villain in Flow, only the constant specter of danger—particularly for the cat, who falls out of the boat and into the water far more times than any small child would likely want to see (there’s a reason this film is rated PG). Given the cat is the primary character, I was sure we would get to the end with it alive and well—or would we? There is only one moment where Flow gets mystical, the cat and the secretarybird suddenly floating into the air toward a swirling celestial sky. I really wondered if we were supposed to be witnessing their deaths. I’m still not quite sure when it comes to the bird.

I see no need to dwell on it, though. Flow is a stunning achievement just in how easily it locks in its audience, from start to finish, without any dialogue beyond real animal noises. I found everything about this film utterly mesmerizing, and by turns suspenseful, sad, occasionally funny, and heartbreaking. One could call the dogs comic relief, they are such doofuses sometimes. But they only ever act like dogs, aside from occasional teamwork in an attempt to help another animal. Until a bunny hops by anyway.

There’s even a whale, who gets comparatively limited screen time and yet it has a story arc, just like any of the other animals. The whale is just as susceptible, if not more so, to the perils of rapidly rising and receding waters as any of the others. I spent a lot of time watching this movie either dazzled or with my heart in my throat. The visual achievement cannot be overstated, particularly the cinematography, where the “camera” is constantly swaying back and forth or swirling around the action, giving it very much the feel of something that was actually captured on camera. And after a tightly edited 84 minutes, the story comes full circle, with the strong suggestion that what all these animals have gone through, they will likely go through again. I don’t want that for them, but I am eager to turn right around and watch this film again, many times over.

Times of crisis make strange bedfellows. Or boatfellows.

Overall: A

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

All We Imagine as Light is the most critically acclaimed wide-release movie of the year, so I went in primed to love it. Since I liked it just okay, that rendered it kind of a letdown.

Maybe there’s something I’m just missing. Maybe I’ll watch this again one day and think: What was I thinking? This is a masterpiece! But I doubt it. I’ll be too busy watching other new movies. This is a good example, though, of how stupidly caught up I can get in the score at review aggregate sites like MetaCritic. A “Must-See” score of 94? It must be amazing! No, not really.

I should have trusted the feeling I had when I watched the trailer. I could find nothing in there that looked particularly worth getting excited about. This is not to say that I can’t find incredibly quiet movies—a huge amount of the dialogue in this film is delivered barely above a whisper—to be deeply impressive. It’s just that this movie, in particular, I am a bit at a loss when it comes to the universal praise it’s getting. Side note: the MetaCritic user score of “Generally Favorable” 7.1 out of 10 is much more in line with how I felt about it.

Which is to say, I don’t have any harsh criticisms of it either. This is just another example, of many films that critics gush over but audiences aren’t nearly as impressed by. There is a perennial divide between the intellectualist consumption of film critics and the populist tastes of audiences, and once again, I find myself falling somewhere in the space between.

And it’s not like I am incapable of gushing over films that general audiences don’t really connect with. Consider TÁR (2022), a film I loved. But there are key things that sets that film apart, including its cinematography, its editing, and most significantly, a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett. I suppose it’s not really fair to compare that to All We Imagine as Light, an international independent film with naturalistic actors totally unknown to American audiences.

I should note that this does not mean they are unknown at all. The lead actor, Kani Kusruti, has more than forty other acting credits. She plays Prabha, a nurse working in Mumbai a year after the husband she was arranged by family to marry went to Germany to work and now no longer even calls her. Her younger and more carefree roommate, Anu, is played by Divya Prabha, who has 16 other acting credits. They work at the same hospital, along with Parvaty, the hospital cook played by Chaya Kadam, who has 60 acting credits. Parvaty is a widow who is getting forced out of the home she’s lived in for 22 years because she has no papers to prove her residence, her late husband having never discussed it with her, and now developers want to build on the land.

I was pretty compelled by the framing of All We Imagine as Light at the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia opening with tracking shots of everyday life in the crowded streets of Mumbai. This is accompanied by anonymous voiceover voices, each in a different language, sharing their impressions of life in that particular city. The differing languages serves to underscore the cosmopolitan nature—if still strictly from the Indian subcontinent—specific to Mumbai. It’s an effective setup for a film primed to be a uniquely accurate portrait of a city, which is the kind of thing I tend to be really into.

Once that introductory vignette is done, it cuts to Prabha, commuting on one of Mumbai’s ubiquitous trains. We only very slowly get to know her, and her living situation, her job, her absent husband, her young roommate who asks her to cover rent this month. There is an aspect of this film using just a few characters to convey a sense of living in the city, and it is indeed done very well—if quietly, and at an incredibly measured pace.

Somewhat surprisingly, only the first half of the film is set in Mumbai. When Parvati decides to stop fighting the developers and move back to her coastal home village 150 miles south of Mumbai, Prabha and Anu help her move, turning it into their own trip to Ratnagiri. This is comparatively very remote, green, serene, and near the beach, and it’s where the second half of the film is set. It’s also where All We Imagine as Light briefly turns into a kind of fantasy on Prabha’s part, and after such gritty realism it had me momentarily very confused.

There is also a subplot regarding Anu engaged in a romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and I had slightly mixed feelings about its fairly rote “forbidden love” aspect. There’s a scene in which Anu is going to sneak out to Shiaz’s neighborhood when his parents are gone to a wedding, but in order not to attract unwanted attention she buys a burka to wear as a disguise. How do Muslim audiences respond to this, I wonder?

If nothing else, I must say that All We Imagine as Light is executed with tenderness above all, a deep empathy for its characters, particularly the three women around whom the story revolves. These details are all very much in the film’s favor, which is sprinkled with several moments of quiet profundity, occasionally quite memorably framed as a picture. I found very little to criticize in this movie. I just couldn’t connect with it as something enduringly special.

This is much how I looked watching this movie. Well, I wasn’t wearing a sari.

Overall: B