 A FilmExposed Film Review |
 Dir: Marzieh Meshkini, 2004, Iran/France, 93 mins, Farsi with English subtitles
Cast: Zahed, Gol-Ghotai, Agheleh Rezaie
In this her second feature, Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini turns her attention towards a devastated post-Taliban Kabul. With both parents in prison, young brother and sister Zahed and Gol-Ghotai spend their days roaming the city streets, eking out a meagre wage by gathering and selling firewood. When a new ruling forbids the children from visiting their mother (Rezaie) (incarcerated at the request of her Taliban soldier husband for remarrying when she thought he was dead), their only hope of reconciliation seems to be to get themselves arrested.
Meshkini’s debut film, The Day I Became A Woman (2000), is a beautifully crafted riposte to the oppressive treatment of women in Iran, which employs playful humour and faintly surreal imagery to highlight the absurdity of its protagonists’ situations. Occasionally Stray Dogs replicates this approach, to striking effect. Stumbling across a VW Beetle in the middle of the desert, the children are startled to find somebody living inside it. Zahed decides that they should break into the vehicle in the owner’s absence, certain they’ll be sent straight to jail when caught. The plan backfires in distinctly offbeat fashion; though angered by the discovery of his diminutive intruders, the stranger is distracted by the sight of an aeroplane passing overhead, an image that recurs throughout the film. His reprimanding of the children descends into an amusingly bizarre, expletive-laden anti-foreigner rant directed at the sky. Gol-Ghotai tearfully begs to be sent to prison, but to no avail. It transpires that the man has lost his family and home in an American-instigated bomb attack. The scene nimbly negotiates the fine line between farce and tragedy, and ultimately unites its participants in a shared cathartic experience.
Visually the film is mesmerising, capturing the dilapidated splendour of Kabul, and the untamed beauty of the Afghan landscape. Scenes shot in drastically different light and weather conditions are skilfully juxtaposed, lending a sense of vibrancy and unpredictability to proceedings. One sequence, during which snow falls against a deep-blue night sky, offset by the spectacle of a fiercely roaring fire, is particularly awe-inspiring. The children are dwarfed in every sense by their imposing, sometimes hostile surroundings, their vulnerability and isolation poignantly emphasised.
Sadly, Stray Dogs’ achievements are somewhat undermined by an overriding tendency towards cheap sentimentality. It was certainly a mistake to team up the cute young protagonists with an even cuter canine companion. A scene in which the grubby, doe-eyed Gol-Ghotai shares hard-earned food with her fluffy sidekick is clearly intended to be heartbreaking, but instead evokes unpleasant memories of numerous saccharine kiddie flicks. As the mother shouts and wails whilst her children are escorted from her cell, reaction shots of the puppy’s blank face neutralise the scene’s emotional impact.
Meshkini is clearly a talented filmmaker, but Stray Dogs lacks the conviction and coherence of vision of its predecessor. Consequently, it emerges as a likeable but curiously inoffensive work, which is the very last thing a film dealing with such an emotive subject should be. |
