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Stray Dogs
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| Year: |
2004
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Director: |
Marzieh Meshkini
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| Stars: |
Zahed, Gol-Ghotai, Agheleh Rezaie
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| Genre: |
Drama |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Belatedly released two years after its premiere at the 2004 London Film Festival, Marzieh Meshkini’s follow-up to The Day I Became a Woman follows Zahed and Gol-Ghotai, brother and sister, adrift in the malaise of post-war Afghanistan. Their mother resides in jail for adultery, because she married again, believing her Taliban husband was dead. By morning the children gather firewood for money and visit their mother every night to sleep in her cell. Miserably lonely, the children hatch a plan to get themselves arrested, hoping they’ll be jailed alongside their mother.
Critics have noted Italian neo realism’s influence upon contemporary Iranian cinema. Meshkini makes the connection explicit by having her child protagonists inspired by a screening of Bicycle Thieves. A nice gag has the ticket seller moan: “There’s a real movie playing at my brother’s cinema. I’ll go see that once this bloody film’s over.” However, the film Stray Dogs most resembles is Shoeshine (1949), Vittorio De Sica’s tale of orphans struggling to survive in post-war Italy.
As in De Sica’s film, children must rely on their wits to survive. Meshkini worked as assistant director to her husband, Mohsen Makhmalbaf - who made the spellbinding Gabbeh (1996) - and shares his gift for drawing captivating, naturalistic performances from her child leads. Gol-Ghotai’s performance is particularly compelling, her honest, heartfelt reactions drive this tragicomic odyssey.
The children inhabit a stark, believably chaotic, semi-surreal landscape, where adults either ignore or abuse them. Encounters with an old man living out of his car who occasionally emerges to rail at passing jets, and an elderly woman who complains she has too many grandchildren to look after, are gut-wrenchingly staged. Yet the film does not wallow in misery and offers a warm portrayal of brother and sister, bonding together against adversity. Meshkini draws parallels between the starving waifs and an actual stray dog they adopt early in the film. Her cutaways to the dog’s reactions are almost Disneyesque, but she never sugar-coats what is essentially a harshly realistic story and follows things through to a sad, but logical conclusion.
In recent times, Iranian cinema has become too post-modern and inward looking, as with Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten (2004), a movie about the making of his own earlier film. Marzieh Meshkini presents a showcase for her native cinema’s finer qualities. A simple tale, but never simplistic.
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| Reviewer: |
Andrew Pragasam
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