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SMELL OF CAMPHOR, FRAGRANCE OF JASMINE Send This Review to a Friend
The power of Iranian films to reveal life in that sad country is expressed with brilliant creativity in the extraordinary new work by Bahman Farmanara, who was not given permission to make a film in his country for some 20 years. How and why "Smell of Camphor, Frangrance of Jasmine" was approved is a mystery, for in his low-key, amusing and perceptive way Farmanara leads us on a tour of so much that is wrong with life in present-day Iran, and yet is permeated with love of country and a glimmer of hope. The work was a selection at the 2000 New York Film Festival.
Farmanara, taking to the screen as an actor as well as a director, plays Bahman Farjami, a filmmaker who returns to his country to shoot a documentary for Japanese television about funeral practices. It is a clever device that provides the opportunity to follow a director through his life. Farjani himself is suffering from a weak heart and in one of the film's especially fabulous sequences he envisions his own death.
What we see includes meeting a woman who has given birth to a baby who dies and is desperately looking for somewhere to leave it. We learn of battered women, restrictions on women, disappearing writers, teenage suicides and a fear that manifests itself in the presence of strangers. Such ominous aspects are mixed with the little indignities of life, such as the director finding that a cemetery plot he has reserved next to his wife's has been given to someone else. We see how a lawyer operates in a shadowy world of fixing problems through connections. Reports of news events that the director watches on television add a further political dimension.
Farmanara frames his story in the mind of his director, which gives him the handy possibility of moving in and out of reality, much the way Fellini did in his more intense "8 1/2." But Farmanara's approach is easygoing. His film is filled with lovely imagery and awareness of nature. It also has a deep respect for his characters, as well as a whimsical, self-critical attitude in the autobiographical touches.
"Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine" both concentrates on detail and contains thought-provoking metaphorical references. All has been blended economically into a virtually seamless production, which emerges as a haunting movie that stimulates the mind while entertaining us with its wit and reflected talent. A New Yorker Films release.
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