Chess of the Wind – The Palace’s Machinations

24 September, 2021

Has anyone ever seen something more deceiving than the grand gates to any given large-scale villa, which shuts itself closed over the world and gives off the sensation that “amongst ourselves, the rich, everything is fine”? Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Reza Aslani closes his 1976 film with a shot in which a woman – the sole survivor of an internecine war over riches and power – pulls her chador on, then decidedly leaves the courtyard which had, up to that point, never been left throughout the duration of the film. The camera frees itself alongside this silhouette, leaving us in the company of a beautiful panoramic shot, taken from a height, which, for the first time, pulls us out of the tensions reigning over these unventilated palace chambers, inhabited only by hate, gluttony and other such evil tides, and offers us in exchange the image of a town that is discernible up to its most modern and proletarian distances. A camera is needed to penetrate the secrets of this tenebrous world which, in the name of etiquette, is capable of hypocrisy and displays of grandeur; behind closed doors, however, the unhappy aristocrats inhabiting it are ready to launch the massacre.

Some directors plant a camera in the middle of a set and adore transforming the present into a merry-go-round. And some directors shoot the remotest of pasts as if cinema had already been born back then, and all of its gestures, its entire grammar would still work freely, without set rules, and which then could be negotiated again and again. On the one hand, Max Ophüls, on the other, Sergei Paradjanov. And between them, holding a world transformed under the lens in balance, while at the same time maintaining the freshness of the first times, is Mohammad Reza Aslani. The palace within the film is a playground where the camera is free to invent its own route, panning from one anguished face to another, climbing onto a shoulder, or, on the contrary, taking its distance from the foolishness within the frame. But this is also a prime pretext for technology to go hand in hand with tradition, recording a throne made of wood and lace turned wheelchair in soft light, a vast guest room tapestried with majestic rugs, a cellar that is chock full of glass cauldrons, some cutlery created by silversmiths. As it were, between our story and the beginnings of cinema there wouldn’t be such a large time gap: and what better idea than that of returning to the pioneers – to their naive frontality, their heavy lighting – to envisage a time long past, but which still haunts us, as if it were superimposed onto our own time?

Chess of the Wind
Chess of the Wind

The wager is fragile, and only a man who knows how to regard luxury without fetishizing it and without transforming it into product placement would be capable of holding his end. Mohammad Reza Aslani manages to do so, maybe also because he is connected to all of these class vestiges by an emotional wave, which makes man and the milieu which locks him in as if it were a corset to potentiate one another. Amid these cold objects reigns a woman (Fakhri Khorvash) who is dead-set on performing the ritual of her mother’s passing into the afterworld by the book: by mourning, by being retained, by going through everything. Initially, the film appears to be the chronicle of an impossible love: with the mother’s solemn memory on the one hand, and the presence of her former partner, a knave who wants to hurry up the process of splitting their fortune, on the other, thus preventing things from going their own way. But, as the plot moves forward, the story’s threads come unstuck all the more abruptly, directly proportional with the paranoia that invades the backyards of these suspicious affluents, who start to murder each other. As in a noir movie with naive and damned lovers, the evil man is hit in the head with a mallet and thus apparently exits the story. But the Iranian filmmaker is much more insidious than that: since his body is deposited in a vessel from inside the cellar for it to be dissolved in acid, but the acid disappears, and the place starts to reek. Then the body disappears, and so the palace’s chambers are threatening to turn into a sort of carnivalesque and dramatic recess, as if it were a nightmarish vision in the vein of Emir Kusturica.

These parallels are helpful to a certain point: since, even though they are referencing a given reality – the film’s imaginative amplitude is tireless, and extracts pleasure from this interplay between formal rigor (many static tableaux) and the destabilizing gust of suffering, which starts to burst through the frame -, they are helpless when it comes to offering a detailed description of how thrilling the film is. Mohammad Reza Aslani manages to resurrect a stuffed world, (literally) discovering its rotting flesh, to the same degree to which it treats its miseries with pudicity and distance. Time and time again, the film’s social acuity takes one by surprise, stuck in the same fixed and respectful position when the family’s servants enter the frame – a few beautiful tableaux, shot from the same angle, with poor women who lie at the hand of the terrifying ebb and flow in the lives of these nobles – and willing to take the same path as the nanny who manages to escape hell in the end. And who, it must be said, is none the wiser, but as thirsty for riches and willing to resort to the lowest of treacheries as the others. For a long time, it was believed that Chess of the Wind – to be more precise, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 – was a lost film. Now, its splendorous images have been restored and can shine in front of us for a second time. It’s already clear that we have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema – not enough for us to understand its entirety, but enough to infer a remarkable artistic vitality. Chess of the Wind is yet another wonderful discovery.

“Chess of the Wind” is showing on Saturday, the 25th of September, as part of the Bucharest Fashion Film Festival.

 



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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.