Seeing Ershadi by Nicole Krauss, 2018
The magic trick:
Using someone else’s art – in this case, the film Taste Of Cherry – to tell a story about finding your identity in adulthood
Shades of Borges. Shades of Murakami. This one is very referential. I mean, it literally offers a detailed plot description (including spoilers) of the Iranian film Taste Of Cherry.
Borges would have done all that for a fictional movie.
This really is the film itself. I guess that’s almost weird, relying on someone else’s art so heavily to prop up your story. But I liked it. And I’ve never seen the film. I don’t believe it is a prerequisite.
The main reason it works, I think, is the theme the film is used to showcase. It’s surprising and original and sets the character portrait askew in a way.
The character portrait itself is maybe not that original. At its core, the story introduces us to a young woman of privilege. She is trying to find her way in this world. She identifies with ballet early in adulthood and by story’s end is a mother of two.
But the film is used to cast a strange light on these various points in her life. Maturity, it seems, makes her early impressions of the film feel childish. And yet. Those feelings don’t totally get replaced. She doesn’t find that she was wrong, per se. The film hasn’t changed; her perceptions have; but even more complicated, her perceptions aren’t cut and dry. She’s less impressionable by the end of the story, but that also may simply mean she’s grown more tired or even more cynical.
It’s a very interesting look at the progress of adulthood, using someone else’s art as the thematic lens.
And that’s quite a trick on Krauss’s part.
The selection:
The film opens with the actor Homayoun Ershadi’s face. He plays Mr. Badii, a middle-aged man driving slowly through the streets of Tehran in search of someone, scanning crowds of men clamoring to be hired for labor. Not finding what he’s looking for, he drives on, into the arid hills outside the city. When he sees a man on the edge of the road, he slows the car and offers him a ride; the man refuses, and when Badii continues to try to convince him the man gets angry and stalks off, looking back darkly over his shoulder. After more driving, five or seven minutes of it—an eternity in a film—a young soldier appears, hitchhiking, and Badii offers him a ride to his barracks. He begins to question the boy about his life in the Army and his family in Kurdistan, and the more personal and direct the questions are the more awkward the situation becomes for the soldier, who is soon squirming in his seat. Some twenty minutes into the film, Badii finally comes out with it: he’s searching for someone to bury him. He’s dug his own grave into the side of one of those bone-dry hills, and tonight he plans to take pills and lie down in it; all he needs is for someone to come in the morning to check that he’s really dead, and then to cover him with twenty shovelfuls of earth.
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