Educational Media Reviews Online

A parable about the urgency of artistic freedom in an oppressive and misogynist society, The White Meadows is filled with strikingly beautiful images of Lake Urima, painterly skies, and a lunar, rocky white landscape. It is also somewhat maddening in terms of its fractured narrative. In a series of vignettes, long-suffering characters rarely smile; in fact, they spend a good deal of time crying. The protagonist, Rahmat, played convincingly by Hasan Pourshirazi, is a boatman whose job is to collect people’s tears to redeem their suffering. He loves his work. He’s been doing it for thirty years, but “but each time is like the first time. Tears have to be prized in order to matter,” he says. But he is ultimately powerless to seek justice, effect transformation for a sea getting too salty, a young bride who doesn’t want to marry, a young boy in search of his father, and a painter who can no longer see color correctly.

Mohammad Rasoulof, who wrote, directed, and produced the film was imprisoned in 2009 for a year, and his editor, the great filmmaker Jafar Panahi (Offside, This is Not a Film), had been under house arrest for “film-related activities” against the Iranian government. Rasoulof’s revenge is sweet in that he militates valiantly in this film against a restrictive society, one, for example, that allows men to kill a young, beautiful woman because her beauty humiliates them. Her body, one man claims, shook when she walked, and this made men angry because “she brought you to the well but you left thirsty.” Rahmat is given her body to take out to sea, but on the lake when he uncovers her, it’s a young boy, Nassim, (Younes Ghazali) who’s switched with her body. He’s in search of his father, a sheep herder who left the family years before. Rahmat is furious, and he throws the boy into the sea and nearly lets him drown. Nassim threatens blackmail—everyone will know Rahmat was looking at her body, he says, so the boatman pulls him back on the boat, allowing the boy to accompany him only if he plays deaf and dumb because otherwise people won’t reveal their heartaches.

Rahmat and Nassim visit an old woman who’s lost her mind and people who confess into jars. The jars are then strapped to a diminutive man who goes into (and gets trapped in) a well “to petition a fairy,” an underwater spirit. This is a long scene that parallels Rahmat’s work and shows the hollowness of superstitious beliefs but is otherwise unconnected to the story. In the next vignette, Nassim ventures to save a young bride from marrying, but he is caught and stoned. When Nassim cries out in pain, Rahmat claims his speech a miracle and takes him back on the boat, although while Rahmat is sleeping, Nassim spills out Rahmat’s coveted collected tears. His reason for doing this; however, is never explained. In the last third of the film, Rahmat is summoned to heal the painter (played by filmmaker Mohammad Shirvani), who at one point climbs up a ladder and is told to look at the sun. Rahmat takes the painter and the wounded Nassim to an isolated island run by the lonely former sheep herder, Nassim’s father. But the father and son don’t recognize each other, and Nassim will die there after being locked up and left outside all night. The painter survives, and the herder begs him to say the sea is blue even if he’s seeing red. The painter “sees wrongly so he paints wrongly,” his jailer states. This is the most blatant reference to artists up against a totalitarianism government like that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s. No matter how society sees the world, an artist should be able to express his individual vision, his politically unencumbered vision.

Rasoulof’s vision is filled with fluids: the sea, drinking water and tea, the ritualistic funneling of tears into a jar. The pace is slow, elemental, often theatrical. There are covered women and slender men in dark suits staged on the beach. The cinematography by Ebrahim Ghafouri is rapturous, but the episodic nature of the film and its lack of a strong dramatic arc or catharsis weaken the impact of Rasoulof’s message. Everyone looks clinically depressed and/or insane. The land is parched and so are people’s souls. There’s more beauty in an increasingly dissipated landscape than there is in humanity. The subtle references to the Green democracy movement are palpable throughout the film, and the final scene of Rahmat on a motorcycle, shot in the colorful splendor of fall foliage, suggests hope for progress and a better day. I admire the filmmakers’ courage and convictions, but this film left me hoping for a better script.

Awards

• AsiaAfrica Special Jury Prize
• Muhr Asia/Africa Award, Best Actor, Dubai International Film Festival