The movie’s action starts at the welfare agency where the girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, have been taken. They’ve had their hair washed and cut short and been given fresh, modern clothes. After some deliberation, the authorities have decided to let the parents take the girls home, on the condition that they no longer be locked up. The parents, though they agree to that, are shamed and angry. The mother curses constantly under her breath, calling the welfare officer “you bitch.” The father feels like he’s been wronged by his neighbors, handled imperiously by the authorities and tarred by the media. The news reports said the girls had been shackled, he complains, and that’s simply not true.
This material is certainly compelling in itself, but what makes the film so striking is the way it provides a structure to contain the material. This structure, which involves having the people play themselves in a “di- rected” situation, isn’t fictional in the usual sense, but it is dramatic: the people create the story by express- ing what they really feel. The ultimate effect, though, depends on extremes that no “normal” situation could provide. For example, while Zahra and Massoumeh are entirely transparent to the camera (they seem intellec- tually impaired, but grow noticeably in sureness and awareness during the course of the film), the father adds to the impression that the reason Iranian directors have been so successful in using “non-actors” is that, on some level, all Iranians are actors: rather than transpar- ency, he presents us with a forceful performance.
The father has been thrust into the public arena willy- nilly, and in his mind, unfairly painted as a villain. Samira
says she gained his trust, and he certainly had reason to give it: the film and his performance represent an unusual chance to restore his self-image with the media, the neighbors, and who knows, with himself as well perhaps. Gruff but garrulous, he’s astonishingly open, not only crying and singing and pouring out his heart on camera, but also in forthrightly opining that women are made for one thing, marriage. In a sense, your heart can’t help but go out to both sides in this battle: the girls because they’re so innocent and full of life and have been treated so unfairly, the father because he’s done the wrong thing for reasons that he’s heartbreakingly convinced are right.
In this case, hardcore fundamentalists (which the father is not) might agree with him, but the state doesn’t. One of the film’s strongest scenes arrives when a female welfare officer comes to the family’s house and firmly rebukes the father for having locked the girls inside again, as he’d promised not to do; she later locks him in, obliging him to attack the door’s bars with a hacksaw. This woman is a wonderful (and wonderfully played) character whose presence offhandedly illustrates the greater social and official status women exercise in Iran compared to other Islamic countries.
As in other Iranian films, symbols and allegory are used here with a naturalness and a potency nearly forgotten elsewhere.
In The Apple, the
Makhmalbafs not only discover a situation innately rich in metaphorical associations, they highlight these with some of their own. Apples, for example, are employed throughout for symbolic purposes,
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