When I was in school they taught us about the Tudors and Stuarts. Later on in the same day, they’d teach us about Shakespeare. When I realised that the both things happened at the same time, I was annoyed. I just thought that if somebody had sat me down and explained to me that everything, that all the bits, fit together. I would have enjoyed school more than I did.
The Hunter, directed by and starring Iranian filmmaker Rafi Pitts, is out on DVD. From the credits onwards, The Hunter is an emphatically political movie. It is a portrait of Iran in the build up to the 2009 presidential elections a time of discontent and disharmony and broken promises. Ali, the main character, takes a misdirected revenge against the state after his wife and child are literally and tragically caught in the crossfire.
It is also an examination of what it is to be a man. Ali searches for a masculine role to inhabit: a husband, a father, a hunter and, finally, an avenger.
This is the issue. The political message of the film naturally subjugates the central figure of Ali. He necessarily becomes an x, a diode in the political discussion. In the meantime, by presenting a thesis on modern masculinity, the political and social setting of the film becomes backdrop or at best metaphor. Both of these could be viable but I feel that neither would be palatable to the director. He tries to do both and in the end does neither.
And neither is handled particularly well. The colouring in of Ali’s character as “Modern Man,” is a clunky litany of clichés. Ali is a man, ergo: He is protective of his family; He is haunted by his infertility; His face is fixed with a Bogey-esque scowl; He likes carrying guns to kill animals and people with; He feels the need to avenge his wife’s death.
At the end Ali concocts a method of suicide, which centres around his inhabiting the role of a violent cop. I’m not sure what the point of this is, but I’m positive there is one.
The political messages of the movie is equally doltish, transmitted through loud images of the 1979 revolution and blaring radio commentaries on the political situation. Heavy handed. Botched.
But beneath all of this, is a successful and moving Hemingwayan ditty. The movie painfully dramatises the bureaucracy of death in the modern world. It examines the insanity of bereavement, not just in Ali’s gun-toting epiphany but in his little accidents and eccentricities. It is also a beautiful film, a Satyajit Ray-ve of pastel colours and funny little cars and 1970s nostal-chic. Mohammad Davudi’s majestic photography must also be applauded for capturing urban and wild Iran with an almost uncomfortable proximity.
And yet you kind of feel that for Rafi Pitts, this is not enough. That for him, “Message” is the penis of serious cinema. For Pitts’ simply telling a story about a man and about life, is small, is effeminate, is too insubstantial for a substantial film-maker like himself.
In the end Pitts’ eminent merits as a film-maker do not rescue this film from its pretentiousness, its didacticism and its hectoring. What it does do: it does make you want to take him by his lapels, and wag your finger in his face, and tell him, in no uncertain terms, to stick to the gay job.
