A Hero: Savvy Iranian Film Demonstrates the Universality of 'No Good Deed Goes Unpunished'
By Jim Slotek
Rating: A-minus
With the lightning-fast machineries of mainstream and social media, there may have been no time like the present when someone could go from hero to zero in minutes.
Oscar-nominated Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (A Separation), with his powerful and perceptive tale A Hero, shows us universalities, from the complexities of human nature to the modernized way we’ve manipulated right and wrong.
He skillfully presents a tale of a good deed gone wrong that ties together shrewd self-interest and generosity without descending to cynicism. A Hero is a portrait of how we are now as human beings, whether we speak Farsi or English.
Rahim waits as his fate is decided in A Hero
In A Hero, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) has been spending time in what amounts to a debtor’s prison, an oddity of the Iranian justice system in which you can be set free by the forgiveness of your debt holder.
As the film begins, he has been granted leave to return to the city of Shiraz, to obtain same from his creditor Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), either by paying all or part of his debt, or appealing to the angry Bahram’s not-so-tender mercies. The return to his family, his speech-impaired son and his adoring secret fiancée Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) hardens his determination to not return to prison.
When Farkhondeh lucks into the discovery of a lost purse with a substantial amount of gold coinage, he is seen to be torn between using the money to partially pay off Bahram and seeking the purse’s owner. (Details become murkier as the movie goes on).
Choosing the latter, Rahim is counselled by people with a vested interest in his act of charity. Prison officials, feeling the heat of an inmate’s recent suicide and seeking good publicity, counsel him to alter the story to make it more sympathetic. A local charity group, also looking to raise their profile, embrace his story to the point of passing-the-hat to erase his debt.
Soon he is on television, wielding his personal charisma and his son as a prop.
There is a powerful seeming sincerity to Rahim that has the opposite effect of making him seem, to some, too good to be true. His fellow prisoners consider him a good-looking liar and con-man. Bahram, on top of having suffered financially and otherwise from his ill-fated loan to Rahim, is now a public villain, determined to prove his own victimhood via “the truth.”
As the details of Rahim’s story become fuzzy, indignation rises. His feel-good story is now a curse. Rahim is not perfect, and he may indeed have a history of manipulation and selfish acts that do not fit the profile of a hero. At the same time, he clearly has an off-and-on desire to do the right thing. Can self-interest (in his case, his reluctance to return to prison) co-exist with heroism? Is anybody in Rahim’s story innocent?
This is the kind of fuzziness that surrounds our black-and-white notions of morality, and which Farhadi is so effective at portraying. We do the right thing under the right conditions. Change the conditions slightly, and behaviors change.
A Hero. Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Starring Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Goldust. Debuts on Prime, Friday, January 21.