REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 79
put his money towards a mortgage instead. The
fact that he has to provide his own white van,
resulting in the sale of the family car that his wife
uses for her job as an NHS carer, is just the first
sign that his new corporate masters’ promise of
flexible working comes at a cost, as they shift
sundry responsibilities to their delivery team.
Laverty’s characteristically diligent research
soon engrossingly lays out the myriad daily traps
in store for the courier driver under pressure to
meet unrealistic targets, as the handheld device
that supposedly plans his daily routes becomes
his unyielding overseer, keeping his every move
under surveillance. It’s understandable that Ricky
is soon looking pretty frayed, yet the character
(and indeed Hitchens’s performance) has a touch
more bite than, say, Dave Johns’s amiable chump
as Daniel Blake. Ricky is a volatile redhead, and his
bristling against a flinty boss is cannily mirrored
by his teenage son’s ongoing struggles with
authority. Seb, played by a convincingly sullen
and self-involved Rhys Stone, hasn’t really come
to terms with the fact that his future prospects are
dependent on knuckling down to schoolwork,
instead allowing his artistic inclinations and
a gang of graffiti taggers to lead him astray.
In contrast, the female side of the family
provides patience, nurture and support, whether
it’s Debbie Honeywood as spouse Abby (whose
caring side is exploited ruthlessly by her NHS
subcontractor employer) or sweet-natured
younger daughter Liza Jane (Katie Proctor, the
latest remarkable child performer in the Loach
filmography), though tellingly both of them reach
their limits of forbearance at moments of crisis.
It’s clear that while the iniquities of the gig
economy’s employment practices give the film
its journalistic mojo, there’s more going on here
than the dramatisation of a hot-button issue. The
way the pressures of work squeeze a loving family
towards disintegration not only provides a telling
emotional undertow but also prompts audiences
to ponder what hopes of fulfilment are available
to working-class people. Here we see whole areas
of unskilled work subsumed into globalised
enterprise, luring in the unwary and cash-poor
with promises of self-improvement. Meanwhile,
Ricky and Abby’s ambitions are shaped by
bourgeois paradigms of home ownership that
are always just out of reach. This is a film that,
like Sean McAllister’s recent documentary A
Northern Soul, gets down to the nitty-gritty of
austerity Britain, pondering whether aspirations
for something better can be sustained against the
reality that unrelenting drudgery remains the
only available option for society’s have-nots.
These are tough questions, and the film
draws attention to them through empathetic
observation of the family’s quotidian travails.
This time, unlike Daniel Blake’s passing drunken
Scot who conveniently rails against Conservative
welfare policy, there’s no on-the-nose dialogue
to deliver the ideological payload. Instead, the
film’s adept construction draws us to start making
connections for ourselves, shepherded along
by Loach’s unshowy but always beady-eyed
direction. One hesitates to speculate whether
this might be the 83-year-old director’s final
bow, but if it were, it would see him exiting on
a note of considerable accomplishment.
Reviewed by Hannah McGill
Lost souls submit to or seek to subvert the
tyranny of beauty in this dry, low-key comedy,
which attempts to reflect the recent dramatic
rise in cosmetic surgery and bodybuilding in a
city that’s been referred to as ‘the nose-job capital
of the world’ for a number of years now. Mina
(Forough Ghajabagli) works in a beauty clinic that
sculpts people into idealised forms, but defiantly
maintains her own generous shape with a diet
heavily dependent on ice cream. Her hobby is
prank-calling the clinic’s male clients in the guise
of a seductress, making dates with them and
then standing them up. Resistant to her bait is
personal trainer and actor Hessam (Amir Hessam
Bakhtiari), who only has eyes for a young male
client, Arshia. Then there’s Vahid (Mehdi Saki),
who has been singing at funerals long enough to
have absorbed dangerous levels of lugubriousness
and can’t get a girlfriend as a result, but spies hope
on the horizon when he meets Mina’s poised
and sparky friend Niloufar (Behnaz Jafari).
The structure of Tehran: City of Love is one of
successive bittersweet vignettes, and the mood
and staging staunchly deadpan and mannered,
making clear homage to Aki Kaurismäki, Roy
Andersson and early Jim Jarmusch. The sort of
self-conscious quirks that mark a film out as being
laser-focused on the festival circuit abound: a
running gag about Louis Garrel being “the most
famous actor in France”; the morose cutesiness
of a sad character dragging around an enormous
teddy bear. Each actor has terrific presence – with
Bakhtiari’s juxtaposition of awe-inspiring bulk
and unassuming sensitivity a particularly striking
find – and some sequences successfully align
the absurdity of oppressive beauty standards
with the characters’ minor humiliations
and perpetually thwarted expectations.
With the showy entitlement of the beautiful,
Niloufar orders fruit salad for dessert, only to dig
into Mina’s ice cream; Mina watches her with
delightfully undisguised affront, but says nothing.
Hessam, confused by the information that the
slight and feminine Garrel is France’s prime box-
office draw, wonders if his local toy shop carries
a jigsaw of the actor’s face; a confused assistant
can only offer him puzzles of “Scarface, Godfather
or Rocky”. Bridging sequences showing groups
of men exercising at Hessam’s gym, meanwhile,
border on dance, and add texture to the film.
The storytelling has a punitive quality,
however, with each of these characters not only
facing adversity but being absolutely affirmed
in his or her chief source of sadness. Mina,
despite the knowing wit that Ghajabagli brings
to her performance and the early transgressive
promise of the prank-call idea, is unattractive and
therefore unlovable. Hessam does need to keep
his homosexuality under wraps. Vahid is too sad
to sing at weddings and too odd for Niloufar.
We’re left with the limited choice of either
a very conservative interpretation (these
peculiar people can’t expect the social reward
of happiness) or a very nihilistic one (they
might deserve happiness, but they’re absolutely
not going to get it). There’s a sense of energy
bubbling under but being quashed by restrictive
tone and format. This may, of course, be the
point; but it’s a bit of a sad and hollow one.
Tehran: City of Love
United Kingdom/The Netherlands/Iran 2018
Director: Ali Jaberansari
Certificate 12A 102m 49s
Tehran, the present. Hessam is a personal trainer with
a sideline as a film actor; Mina works as a receptionist
in a beauty clinic; and Vahid is a funeral singer. All are
in early middle age and unmarried. Hessam gets a
part in a French film starring Louis Garrel, and at the
same time takes on a new private client, Arshia. Mina
begins calling men who attend the clinic, sending
them photographs of a model she pretends to be,
making dates with them and standing them up. Vahid
wants a girlfriend, but his job surrounds him with
grief. He shifts into singing at weddings, and meets
attractive photographer Niloufar, who encourages
him. Hessam becomes infatuated with Arshia, and
spends more and more time with him, dropping out of
the film. Mina is charmed by a shy client, and phones
him as herself, but he turns out to be married, as does
another date she meets at an evening class. Vahid
makes a mess of a wedding gig, is thrown out and
gives up the work. Arshia, suspicious of Hessam’s
attentions, fires him. Vahid meets up with Niloufar, but
she tells him she is about to relocate, permanently, to
Australia. Mina buys herself a man-sized teddy bear.
Produced by
Babak Jalali
Written by
Ali Jaberansari
Maryam Najafi
Director of
Photography
Mohammad Reza
Jahanpanah
Editing
Ashkan Mehri
Production Design
Payam Foroutan
Music
Hamed Sabet
Sound Design
and Mix
Hossein Abolsedgh
Costume Design
Payam Foroutan
©Here & There
Productions
Production
Companies
Here & There
Productions presents
in co-production
with Viking Film,
Kavir Film Isatis
Supported by
The Netherlands
Film Fund
With the support of
The Hubert Bals Fund
of International Film
Festival Rotterdam
Cast
Forough Ghajabagli
Mina
Mehdi Saki
Vahid
Amir Hessam
Bakhtiari
Hessam
Behnaz Jafari
Niloufar
Amir Reza Alizadeh
Arshia
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Subtitles
Distributor
New Wave Films
Lost souls: Forough Ghajabagli
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 10
