A Film a Week - Oh, What Happy Days!

 previously published on Cineuropa

A conference call involving two to five parties. The shadows of the past. Political and class conflict. Unearthed secrets. A deal to be made by any means necessary, including blackmail and deception. All of this is to be found in Homayoun Ghanizadeh’s very unusual, even peculiar, avantgarde film Oh, What Happy Days!, which has just premiered in the Critics’ Picks competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Actress Homa (Golshifteh Farahani in her first role in an Iranian movie since she went into exile) is being blackmailed by Hashemi (Navid Mohammadzadeh), who possesses a compromising tape. Hashemi was the son of the head servant at her family’s compound before the 1979 revolution, and now he may or may not be a state agent. In order to avoid public shaming because of the viral video, she must persuade her exiled grandfather (“godfather of Iranian cinema” Ali Nasirian) to make a deal with him on the compound, or otherwise the government will seize it. To achieve this, Homa tries to rely on her aunt (renowned artist Shirin Neshad) and her uncle (Payman Maadi), both exiled as well, to help persuade this stubborn old man clinging to decades-old grudges.

Forced into a Zoom call that plays out in real time, Homa comes to know a piece of her family and her country’s history, and becomes aware of political and class conflicts before and after the revolution. She also gets to know the truth about the deaths of her father, who was framed in the turbulent post-revolutionary times, and her uncle, who never reached adulthood, and what the term “happy days” (referring to the times before the revolution) really means to people from different walks of life. The price of happiness for the chosen few was paid by many…

What we see is the same medium-close-up shot from a fixed position mimicking the angle of a laptop camera, either in a single shot or on a screen divided into up to five sections. The composition and placing of the individual shots in the mosaic sometimes suggests a code of sorts, whether it concerns class, age or current degree of power. The “costumes” the characters are wearing are the same – ie, prison uniforms – and the production design consists of the same barren wall, a desk and a chair. Usually, it is all in black and white, but it sometimes gets infused with colour, for an obvious reason or for seemingly no reason at all.

Homayoun Ghanizadeh, who also has a background in theatre, describes his method for Oh, What Happy Days! as “suitcase cinema”, since it was filmed in different locations, from Iran to the USA, via Paris, with the director travelling between the actors. The result is an avantgarde, risky piece of cinema that speaks volumes about the past and the present, displacement, separation from one’s home country and its culture, and even the feeling of being trapped inside it, since in this case it is ruled by a crumbling regime that refuses to give up.

The question here is how long it will take for the main gimmick (which might remind us of the dreaded “COVID-19 cinema”) to wear off, but the answer might surprise us. The story is engaging and is told fluently and naturally, in a way that does not insult the viewer’s intelligence, plus the top-notch acting by these contemporary and erstwhile stars of Iranian cinema channels a plethora of emotions. Oh, What Happy Days! might even open up a completely new avenue in cinema.

A Film a Week - When the Phone Rang / Kad je zazvonio telefon

 originally published on Cineuropa

"It happened in a country that no longer exists, except in books, films and memories of those born before 1995", we are informed by the off-screen narrator (Slavica Bajčeta) at the very beginning of Iva Radivojević’s third feature When the Phone Rang, premiering in Locarno's Cineasti del presente competition. The phone rang one Friday, at 10:36 in the morning, the year was 1992, and it completely changed the world our protagonist and the filmmaker’s alter-ego Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) had existed in so far. In the first repetition (of ten in total), she is informed by the voice from the other side that her maternal grandfather died of a heart-attack. For her, that call announced the war, so soon enough, she and her family left the country.

The narrator explains that the urgency of the call lasted for days for Lana, and we soon get the meaning of that phrase. In the next repetitions, Lana receives different phone calls from different people, always on Friday and always at 10:36AM. We learn a thing or two about her fascination with her older sister's classmate Vlada (Vasilije Zečević), a punk-rocker and an anarchist who doesn't care about death, a glue-sniffer and her protector on the street; but also about the routine spying games she plays with her younger neighbour Jova (Anton Augustin), following and imagining the lives of strangers; having to say goodbye to her friends Mirjana and Olja; the words of love she shares with Andrijana; the troubles her father might have gotten into by dealing with a mobster nicknamed “The Barking One”; and the army background of her paternal grandfather…

It seems enough for several lives, or at least several periods of a life, and all of it rings true individually, but combined, these events only make sense as a mix of fading memories. But Radivojević’s film is not about the “facts” of the lives of the characters around Lana – instead, it is interested in the memories that tend to be produced at an inflationary pace at formative periods, and which often melt together with others into a confusion where only vague sentiments and emotions can be remembered. In this case, it is the memory of the collapse of Yugoslavia in a bloody war, and of the lives of ordinary people slipping into uncertainty, riddled with crime and poverty during the 1990s, as seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl.

Filming in the city of Novi Sad and finding locations that have not changed much since the 1990s, Radivojević makes a powerful and intelligent film that hits on both the cerebral and the visceral level. As was the case with her earlier works, she maintains full control over the material, working as her own editor, production designer and casting director. Regarding the latter, she really picked interesting, talented newcomers she could work with easily, especially Natalija Ilinčić, whose interpretation of Lana going through different emotions is simply stellar, further highlighted by Radivojević’s close-ups. 

The use of 16mm stock in Martin Dicicco’s cinematography might seem as risky, counter-intuitive move since the format is usually associated with more pleasant memories, but it brings another layer of dreaminess where colours get enhanced in a seemingly natural way, and the graininess of the material creates a foggy, blurry look corresponding with fading childhood memories. In the end, When the Phone Rang is an extremely well-made film, a concentrated and stimulating viewing experience that stays with the viewer.