It focuses on a family’s uncomfortable road trip in a rented car through remote north-western Iran, heading towards the Turkey/Azerbaijan border. There are four family members (plus an ailing dog): the grumpy, lumbering, cigarette-smoking husband (played by the excellent Hasan Majuni) with a broken leg in plaster (but who the wife suspects is putting on an act – the cast has been ‘on’ some four months!); the mother (played wonderfully by Pantea Panahiha) sitting in the front passenger seat and making regular dry observations; the quiet, elder son (Amin Simiar) is at the wheel and seemingly in a world of his own; and finally the clowning, irrepressible 8-year-old son (Rayan Sarlak) – in many ways the ‘star’ of the film.
I found the ‘plot’ somewhat confusing at the start… the younger son was told his brother was leaving the country temporarily to get married, but it transpires that the real reason has more to do with him being smuggled out of the country - perhaps to avoid being conscripted into the army? (well, at least that’s what I’d decided by the end of the film).
Two of the film’s many highlights, for me, were scenes in which, first, the mother lip-syncs to an Iranian pop song on the radio and then, later, the younger son performs a similar, but in a deep bass voice, lip-sync ‘accompaniment’ which reflects both the family’s pain at the demise of the dog (sorry, *spoiler alert*!) and the uncertainty of what lies beyond for them. I know the lip-sync sounds a little ridiculous, but both scenes were beautiful and quite moving.
It's a mesmerising film which, brilliantly and bizarrely, is able to convey humour, heartache, beauty, fear and defiance. It’s quite brilliant.
PS: The one downside for me was having to watch the film in the small Cinema 2 studio… it was a sell-out and, for me, all a little cramped and claustrophobic.
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