CIRCUMSTANCE PLAYING NOW AT THE GRAND CINEMA >>>
A feeling of paranoia arrives early in writer-director Maryam Keshavarz's film, Circumstance, and it never leaves. We see two young women - the beautiful Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and the beautiful Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) - giggling and playfully pushing each other on a sidewalk. Their intimacy means friendship, but suggests more: these teenagers are in love. Suddenly we watch them through the grainy lens of a security camera. The movie refuses to explain this moment, and it doesn't have to. We know intuitively this forbidden affair cannot last - the rest is simply waiting for the circumstances of its destruction.
Before that happens, Keshavarz introduces us to her heroines' families and their lives in Tehran, Iran. Atafeh's parents joined the political revolution a generation before but have since settled into a comfortable, bourgeois existence. Their son Mehran returns home after trouble with drugs, converts to Islam and begins working for the local Morality Police. Shireen, meanwhile, no longer has her mother and father (eliminated apparently for political reasons), and now suffers calls from suitors arranged by her uncle. Both girls find escape in the underground club scene - and in each other.
Like Brokeback Mountain, Circumstance rises above its hackneyed love-against-the-odds plot with truly passionate performances from the lead actresses. The film also forces you to feel the fear and tension between characters. No one lets on how much, if anything, they know about Atafeh and Shireen's true relationship. The suspicious glance a mother gives the girls during an otherwise pleasant volleyball game could mean nothing, or mean everything.
Thankfully the film diffuses the building suspense with some lighthearted teenage abandon. The funniest scene shows friends dubbing sex scenes from the American movie Milk into Persian. But like the authorities who sit hidden in the shadows with their cameras, always recording, Circumstance reveals much more than what simply meets the eye.
Last Saturday afternoon's showing of Circumstance concluded with a live Skype chat with the film's composer, Gingger Shankar. (Her last name should strike a chord; her grandfather is famous Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.) She visited The Grand Cinema back in August for the 25 New Faces Festival, which screened another project she had worked on.
With credits that include The Passion of the Christ and Charlie Wilson's War, Shankar discussed Circumstance's unique musical presence, which blends Iranian and Indian styles and doesn't conform to a traditional soundtrack format. "Music was a character in the film," she says, "(since) Iranian culture is a culture where everybody sings and it's always happy."
The joy behind the music, however, ebbs away as the film's tone darkens, and Shankar traced this trajectory: "At the beginning...there's so much music, and as the story progresses and the brother (Mehran) becomes more fanatical, the music starts dropping out more and more...(and) becomes very discordant."