(like Sabzian) yet openly despised by others, who suspect that his chameleon-like transformations, e.g. from fundamentalist to humanist, are opportunistic at best, schizoid at worst. Ultimately, as Orson Welles said he tried to do in Citizen Kane, the film gives us a “prismatic” portrait of a single personality, and viewers must decide for themselves which facets they believe.
The film’s story refers to the 17-year-old Makhmalbaf, an anti-Shah activist (a/k/a Islamic terrorist) who, in 1974, participated in an attack on a police station in which he stabbed a young policeman and was himself shot, then imprisoned and tortured for four years. Flash forward roughly a decade: Makhmalbaf is now a famous director making The Cyclist (the film that brought Hossein Sabzian and Mrs. Ahankhah together) when a man approaches him, says he was the policeman that Makhmalbaf stabbed way back when, and that he now wants to be an actor. The filmmaker files the incident for later use.
When A Moment of Innocence opens, the policeman from his past shows up at Makhmalbaf’s home in Tehran looking for work as an actor. As it happens, the filmmaker needs the supplicant’s help in mounting a film about their violent youthful encounter. As that film is developed, both Makhmalbaf (playing himself) and the policemen (Mirhadi Tayebi) are assigned juvenile “selves,” young actors they are to coach and instruct in recreating that long-ago attack. The policeman grouses that Makhmalbaf has chosen a handsome lad to play himself and a homely boy to play him.
Their separate rehearsals uncover buried connections between the former antagonists. On the day of the attack, it emerges, the young policeman had been waiting to give a flower to a girl who spoke to him every day, a girl who was in fact the young Makhmalbaf’s cousin and accomplice. Thus did a crime of violence mask one of love, trust and idealism betrayed.
Given the film’s serious emotional and political content, its tone is surprisingly bemused and at times dazzlingly lyrical. The great cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari’s camera limns the dream-like hush of Tehran’s snow-covered streets, and ultimately choreographs the main characters in a rapturous “dance of destiny” in which Makhmalbaf’s re-visioning of history (both his and Iran’s) results in one of cinema’s most fervent and stirring statements of pacifism.
As in Close-Up, with which it shares the overtly poetic/ symbolic use of elements such as flowers, the final emphasis here is on art’s powers to redeem reality. No, the past and its violence can’t be changed, but we can change the world and ourselves by re-imagining our relationships to those things. While this might sound a bit airy-fairy coming from a Western filmmaker, in Iran it packed a very potent political punch. The authorities who initially embraced and backed Makhmalbaf had grown increasingly disenchanted with him as he made films like The Cyclist, which questioned the direction of Iran since the Revolution. In renouncing the violence of the Revolution in A Moment of Innocence, he could be seen as renouncing the Revolution itself, a true heresy. (Makhmalbaf grew increasingly unpopular
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