“War President” is an image. It is not a textual statement or rhetorical argument. An image is like an empty room and any message that one reads in that room necessarily came in the baggage one carried when one walked in the door. If I made an image of George Washington composed of images of the American dead from the revolution, would viewers likely take that image as an indictment of Washington? I submit that they would not. It would be viewed as a monument to the dead and a celebration of a great leader, a somewhat maudlin monument maybe but surely not offensive. The fact that “War President” is not viewed [in] such a manner is not due to any intrinsic power of “War President” but lies somewhere else. —posted by the creator of the War President mosaic (matrixmasters.com/world/usnews/WarPresidentMosaicStory.html)
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Like 25th Hour, this Iranian feature has something important to say about the way we all live, though it’s not remotely didactic. (The only exception is a single, seemingly extraneous early scene featuring one of Kiarostami’s characteristic sages in residence–like the taxidermist in Taste of Cherry and the doctor in The Wind Will Carry Us—who turns up in a cafe to expound wittily, grandly, and unnecessarily on the moral nuances of stealing to the hero and his best friend, who has just snatched a purse.) Panahi is a seeker more than a finder, and what he has to say about the modern world in general and contemporary Iran in particular can’t be reduced to a simple message. Like War President, a portrait of George W. Bush made up of hundreds of small photos of American soldiers killed in Iraq, it’s an image rather than a rhetorical argument—another empty room whose message arrives in one’s own baggage.
The tentative and partial answer to the question has to do with class humiliation—Hussein and Ali are both humiliated at the jewelry store, where later they, along with Ali’s sister, are humiliated again—and with a form of petty harassment that’s implicitly seen as a normal part of contemporary urban existence. The humiliation and harassment might be viewed as two versions of the same thing, stemming from social paranoia and institutional indifference to the suffering of ordinary people—which certainly aren’t limited to Iran.
It’s an absurd form of everyday, paranoid bureaucratic intimidation that called to mind something I witnessed a few days ago at O’Hare, where new rules now force almost all foreigners to be fingerprinted before entering the U.S. The lines were longer and slower than I’ve ever seen in any airport, though as a U.S. citizen I didn’t have to wait as long. I had to wonder how irritating, insulting, and humiliating thousands of visitors every day could possibly make this country any safer. In 2000 Panahi himself was shackled and expelled for refusing to be fingerprinted while changing planes in New York en route to South America from Hong Kong, and to further protest the fingerprinting of all Iranians who come here, he now refuses to enter this country. Ironically he’s accused of being an American agent by some Iranian mullahs because of the implied social criticism in the party scene described above—one reason Crimson Gold is banned in Iran. This kind of provincial cluelessness and universal mistrust must ultimately make the whole world kin.
In Toronto critic Robin Wood compared this sequence with the scenes involving the Tramp and the millionaire in Chaplin’s City Lights. I think that most of Crimson Gold and all of its major characters verge on being comic. Hussein is big and slow, Ali small and manic, and the two often resemble a slapstick duo like Laurel and Hardy. The teenage soldier is something of a humorous hayseed, and the scene in the penthouse, climaxing in a weirdly hilarious dive into a swimming pool, gets much of its comic energy from Nakhayi’s Woody Allen-ish neuroses and nonstop patter. Surely it’s just a coincidence, but the only other film with the title Crimson Gold that I came across on the Internet Movie Database is a 1923 comic western.
Directed by Jafar Panahi
Written by Abbas Kiarostami
With Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Shahram Vaziri, Ehsan Amani, and Pourang Nakhayi.
