Set in an unidentified country where a nameless military dictator rules with an iron fist, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The The President is possessed with the distinct air of fairy-tale obliqueness that feels at odds with its rapid descent into hazy wartime parable.
The film opens with its most effective set piece. “His Majesty,” as the character is exclusively identified, looks out upon the capital city, soaking in the magnitude of his power. A power he demonstrates directly: picking up a phone to command a distant functionary to turn off the lights across the entire city, like a child toying with a switch. After a few further flicks on and off for emphasis, the lights then fail to return, replaced by tiny embers of gunfire flaring out along the city’s edges. What follows is a rapid descent into pandemonium that possesses much of the melancholy absurdity the veteran Iranian director is known for, but little of the thoughtful complexity that’s marked his best movies.
The The President, which was filmed a few years ago, feels insufficient, in part because its core fable is more relevant than ever. Totalitarian despots are currently having a moment as Donald Trump continues to manhandle the American democratic system in service of his own insatiable ego, Vladimir Putin pushes plutocratic strongmanship to audacious new lows and Bashar al-Assad seems to have secured his position atop Syria’s shaky government, having laid waste to the entire country in the process. In such an environment, a chronicle of the pitfalls of absolute power is more timely than ever. Yet while the film certainly has things to say about this modern state of affairs, its loose mythical structure plays out to definitively diminishing returns.
While it might be gauche to compare the circumstances of a world-renowned director to the plight of Earth’s booming refugee population, Makhmalbaf is, in a sense, stateless.. He’s lived outside of Iran since the events of the 2009 election uprooted the country’s greatest cinematic voices, sending Abbas Kiarostami into an equivalent creative exile and leaving Jafar Panahi under house arrest. So while a director mostly known for illustrating elaborate scenarios of everyday hardship may seem ill-equipped at the helm of a war movie about a tyrant on the run, the tale of a man with the power to create anything suddenly left without a place in the world jibes both with his customary approach and his own status, functioning as a big-budget analogue to Panahi’s po-mo chamber dramas.
The film is structured as a see-saw slowly tipping from wealth to poverty. The progression considers the distance between ruler and refugee, which is not as considerable as it might seem. The The President opens in a carefully composed world of ordered illusion within an immaculate alabaster palace full of faithful servants and gleaming marble surfaces. That fantasy crumbles as a long-simmering revolt boils over, and erodes further as he enters his private limousine accompanied by his family. They head to the airport, where he plans to shuttle them off out of the country as the protests escalate, remaining behind to handle the conflict alone. This journey devolves into a portrait of chaos, an entire movie’s worth of sibling rivalry and royal dysfunction compressed into a short three minute scene. The leader struggles to ignore the commotion, insistently waving to the remnants of his public through the vehicle’s tinted windows, desperate to keep up appearances.
Just as the autocrat’s initial stunt with the local light supply unleashed an uprising, this domestic tempest in a teacup is soon mirrored by greater external unrest, the city erupting into violence as soon as the family boards the plane. His Majesty is left alone with his stubborn grandson, a spoiled whelp dressed in identical military attire, and the two soon settle into a downwardly mobile riff on Chaplin’s The Kid, fleeing the embattled limousine and decamping to the countryside. Armed with only a pistol and the haughty insistence of the terminally privileged, the two are forced to don peasant clothes and hide out among the poor. Posing as refugees, they attempt to cross the border and evade their potential captors, who have allied with the military to take control of the country.
Many of the scenarios that follow in this picaresque journey work as discrete pieces, as the former king tries frantically to cash in on the degrading capital of his once all-powerful fame, trading on promises of unimaginable wealth in exchange for help from terrified peasants. But despite Makhmalbaf’s usual facility with depicting poverty as a pitched battle between dignity and desperation, the film never reaches the pointed effectiveness of its early passages. There’s a jarring roughness to the movement from ordered opulence and the measured satire thereof to pure bedlam, a dervish of helicopter blades, militia executions and swirling dust all conveyed via bone-rattling hand-held camerawork. Shot in Georgia and Tajikistan, the latter a prime example of dictatorial excess gone amok, the film’s well-chosen settings reflect its tone, but its ultimate emotional message, capped off by a concluding plea for peace, seems less targeted toward immediate political allegory than general economic fable. While The The President initially benefits from its imprecise fairy-tale structure, the move into frenetic realism only makes the non-specificity of this parable seem all the more imprecise, leaving what could have been a perfectly timed allegory feeling frustratingly incomplete.
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