‘The Seed Of The Sacred Fig’: Cannes Review

Dir. Mohammad Rasoulof. Iran/Germany/France 2024. 173 mins. 

Cannes Competition entry The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about an investigator working for the Iranian theocratic regime who has aspirations to be a judge in the nation’s Islamic Revolutionary Court – the same body that recently sentenced the film’s dissident director Mohammad Rasoulof a flogging and eight years imprisonment. After a last-minute departure from his native country, Rasoulof has come to Cannes to present an urgent fictional exposé of current tensions within Iran, as the brutality of official repression is enacted within one apparatchik’s family. The film is uneven: gripping when it maps out psychological stresses in a claustrophobic domestic setting, less so in the final stretches when it incongruously morphs into a women-in-peril thriller.

An impassioned outcry against oppression

As an impassioned outcry against oppression, however, and a depiction of how a new generation – notably female – is challenging a long-entrenched status quo, the film is nevertheless essential watching for audiences even beyond Rasoulof’s fanbase from films including 2020’s There Is No Evil, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin.

Misagh Zare plays Iman, a long-serving civil servant who has been promoted to the role of investigator for the Revolutionary Court – and is well on track to be one of its all-powerful judges. Iman sees this as a blessing: it will mean new, more spacious accommodation for his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and their two daughters, not to mention the new household goods that Najmeh craves. One catch is that the job requires the entire family to be visibly above reproach, which means correctly worn hijabs for daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), and restrictions on social media use – something not calculated to please two independent-spirited young women of college and high-school age respectively.

Essentially a man of principle, Iman is horrified to realise that his job requires signing off on death sentences without even reading the case notes – something that boss Ghaderi (Reza Akhlagi) advises him to do without question. At home, Najmeh – devoted both to Iman and to the existing order – offers moral support and tries to keep the girls on-message. But Tehran is rocked by demonstrations against the death in police custody in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for ‘improper’ wearing of the hijab. Official TV coverage of the demonstrations contrasts sharply with the phone-shot footage watched by the sisters, showing police brutality, introducing an irreducibly urgent thread of recent real-life documentary material.

Two key events lead to the family’s implosion. One is the fate of Rezvan’s friend Sadaf, caught in the turmoil: reluctantly, Najmeh finds herself tending the girl, and removing police buckshot from her bloodied face. The other is the sudden disappearance of the gun which Iman has been given to protect himself and his family from anti-authority activists. Desperate to save his career by finding out who has taken it, Iman asks for help from Alirezah, a renowned interrogator – whose quizzing of Najmeh and her daughters, the latter seen blindfolded, is the film’s most disturbing, and visually powerful, sequence.

However, once the family leaves Tehran for a break in a dilapidated country house, the film, sharply scripted till then, begins to come off the rails – or rather off the road, in a car chase sequence that introduces jarring discord as Rasoulof takes the narrative up a gear. In the final stretch, Najmeh’s paranoia gets the better of him as he starts playing out the brutalities of the regime within the household; a last defiant rally from the women brings things to an overplayed climax, as the family chase each other around a labyrinthine ruined building.

At nearly three hours, the narrative is overstretched, and Rasoulof’s filmic rhetoric sometimes gets the better of him – most grievously in the sequence involving Sadaf, as an extreme close-up of her bloodied face is held in glittering light, with a plangent background lament from a female singer superfluously cranking up the emotion.

There’s other clumsiness here, too, not least the protracted business of investigating the missing gun – a theme already awkwardly set up in the first hour, with the firearm pointedly glimpsed at every possible opportunity.

The film’s real craft lies in the way that Rasoulof progressively plays the family members off against each other. He initially establishes Iman as a figure of sensitivity and principle, with Najmeh as the real by-the-book conformist in the household, whose position only belatedly begins to shift as she starts to re-examine her loyalties as a wife, a mother and a citizen. The performances by the four leads are impeccable, their naturalistic casualness offsetting the tendency to melodrama. But perhaps the single most incisive moment comes when Iman exchanges looks with the young woman in the car next to him – short hair, no hijab, dance music on the radio, and a coolly defiant look that says that the old order’s days are surely numbered.