Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami’s Terrestrial Verses is a compact series of nine vignettes, each depicting one side of a charged interaction between a patron, job candidate or person seeking help from an authority figure, be they a government agency worker, a boss, or a clerk. Set in modern-day Tehran, Asgari and Khatami work to expose with prickly realism and dashes of absurdity, the stringent rules and customs that still apparently govern much of societal behavior in Iran. The societal commentary is a bit surface-level, but the film’s formalism is rigorous enough to hold one’s attention and the writer-directors in almost every segment offer just enough distinct characterization to maintain interest.
In each story, which lasts a little under 10 minutes, the camera is placed carefully and shrewdly, and the compositions are always well-arranged and dynamic, communicating just enough information. There’s never a cut or adjustment of angle or visual perspective in any of the chapters, which are each named after a relevant character, usually the individual who we’re watching the whole time. The often cruel and reprehensible people in positions of power are never shown onscreen, their stern voices coming from out of sight. This cinematographic rigorousness is one of the primary pleasures of the movie — the film rewards those who get off on a certain degree of obsessive aesthetic consistency that, intentionally or not, is ironically a bit like the dogmatic views being espoused by the supposed villains here.
There are also pops of color in many of these shots that start to bear a political weight. The penultimate vignette, in which a film studio executive goads a screenwriter (Farzin Mohades) to extricate his honest depictions of patriarchal violence (and a resulting patricide), is laced with bright yellows, while an earlier segment, one of the most charming in the movie, hinges on a young girl named Selena (Arghavan Shabani) who would much rather dance in the mirror in her Mickey Mouse sweatshirt than try on the smothering garb she must don for her upcoming obligation ceremony. No shade of red is to be visible, we hear a retail attendant discuss offscreen with her mother, and yet, Selena has a mop of auburn hair. These restrictions require a stifling and erasure of people’s most natural qualities.
Western cultural artifacts are rejected in general; we see not one but two Mickey Mouse-emblazoned garments over the course of the film (much to the desk jockeys’ dismay) and in the first sequence, a new father (Bahram Ark) is repeatedly told he can’t name his infant David. What’s engaging about these observations isn’t their novelty or edification but rather the ridiculous lengths to which these authority figures will go on their persecuting power trips. That is, until we come across moments of true humiliation or even violation, like Faezeh (Faezeh Rad), who is repeatedly harassed and disrespected by a piggish man who’s supposedly interviewing her for a job at a concrete business, or Siamak (Majid Salehi), a mild-mannered applicant for a job at a different company who’s harangued for his lack of knowledge about Shia practices. In these segments, the film veers suddenly into a sobering reality check, and they’re fairly affecting, but don’t quite square with the tone and intent of the other segments. Yet there is also not enough variation of subjects or time spent here to make for a truly multi-dimensional mosaic of citizen-authority relations in Tehran. Altogether, Terrestrial Verses is a collection of well-composed sketches.
Photo courtesy of KimStim
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