Downpour (Bahram Beyzaie , 1972)

... That Man is Gone

(On the occasion of releasing the restored version of Downpour)

Amir Siadat

Hekmati (Parviz Fanizadeh) is standing in front of Mr. Rahim (Manuchehr Farid) in a quiet night: the former has glasses, and the latter holds a cleaver in his hand. Hekmati is a literature teacher, a cultural representative. Mr. Rahim is a butcher, motivated by slaughter. These two men are rivals; both in love with the same woman. We feel closer to the teacher because we have been with him throughout the film. We have seen him in his solitude, and we are aware of his temperament, strengths, and weaknesses. We have seen how the butcher cowardly humiliated the teacher in front of his students. However, we only saw the butchers recklessness and violence till now. At this particular moment, he is just a typical flat figure and the duel between them is actually a confrontation between a character and a typical figure who exactly at this scene slowly evolves into a character. Such evolution justifies both sides of this love triangle as human beings with their own reasons and behaviours. Considering class, education, and social status, these two men are far apart but at this encounter they exchange something with each other, they even play each others roles for brief moments. The drunk butcher wears the teachers glasses at the table, and later on, in the alley, the teacher brutally beats the butchers leg with a cudgel. At the end of this sequence, the camera fixes on the butchers wet eyes. Defeated and lonely, he has been left alone in the middle of the alley. Silence engulfs the neighborhood. This is a moment that the butcher transforms into a full-fledged character as Mr. Rahim. This was happening at a time that anything problematic was conveniently divided into dichotomies of good and evil in our literature, theatre, cinema and even in the Iranian real world. However, by creating real characters with real flaws and weaknesses, Downpour allows the audience to revise their judgments, so it deviates from the norms of its time. In the midst of endless quarrels and grapples among saints and evils of Filmfarsi, Hekmati and Mr. Rahims encounter in Downpour reveals both empathy and mutual understanding. Downpour is a film that reveals the inner layers of human nature.

Downpour was made at a time that everything was more or less fixed in Iranian cinema. Some were good, and some were not; some were innocent, and some were tyrannical. To have an ideal world evil should be destroyed by a perfect hero, a motto that often governed the plot of Iranian films at those years. Finding such heroes was not difficult: hoodlums, rebels, and vandals, the ones who carry and guard the traditional tribal values and who have no connection with modernization, city, cultural values, and the law. Gheysar (Behrouz Vossoughi) in Masoud Kimiaei`s Gheysar (1969), is a great example, he comes from a low socio-economic class, he is an avenger and for him dignity means to launch a bloodshed. Iranian Intellectual discourse at those years approved the anarchism and violence of Gheysar, which was in line with its revolutionary values. So Gheysar and Gheysarism became fashionable, and a considerable range of Iranian filmmakers made their films under its influence for more than a decade. However, Downpour made two years after Gheysar, was critical of Irans political, intellectual, and revolutionary discourses in an indirect way and perhaps subconsciously it demonstrated Beyzaeis objection with Gheysarism and intellectual absolutism. In several consecutive shots, the butcher, to defend his tainted honour, performs a ritual machete dance, arranges his hair, and flaunts his physical power, as he gets ready to go and put his rival in his place. These shots remind us of Gheysar as he got ready for his fight, but this time the audience is emotionally attached to Hekmati rather than the butcher and his fight. So the glorious epic of Gheysar has been replaced with feelings of empathy and love. In Downpour, the usual equations of the popular films at one side and the intellectual films at the other side, were broken because both of these films were used to demonstrate and reinforce the accepted traditions of society. At the height of heroism in Iranian cinema, the main character of Beyzaeis film is a short tiny man who has no exceptional physical power and no grudge against the law or the authorities, he is not violent, and so he is not a typical Iranian hero. His aim is not a rapid annihilation of the status quo, but rather piecemeal reforms of a limited area. He wants to bring happiness to the children who are deprived of entertainment, to transform an abandoned auditorium into a theater hall, to clean the windows, to polish the floors, and paint the rusty chairs. But he is a fragile man and his destiny is against him, as he lives in an era of demolition and violence. At the beginning of the film when Hekmatis mirror shatters and he runs agitatedly in the downhill of his neighborhood, it somehow predicts his inevitable failure. He does not belong there. That era belongs to butchers.

Downpour has the same roots as Gheysar. It walks through the same alley but it ambles through other houses. There is no sign of Gheysars sternness and seriousness, Downpour is mischievous, playful, and familiar with the childrens world. Hekmatis happiness, along with his students, are intertwined in the texture of the film itself. Look at the mechanism of cutting which intentionally ignores the classical continuity editing when Hekmati enters the neighborhood for the first time, or the removal of the transitional shots to get into the action as fast as possible. The conversation between Hekmati and his colleague in the schools office cuts to a scene of them standing in front of Hekmatis library at home. In another scene, Mossayeb (Abbas Dastranj)s image as he sits waiting in front of Hekmatis house immediately cuts to the moment that Hekmati arrives home. Hekmatis exit from the schoolmasters house is shown by only a shot of his hand taking his coat off a hanger. The film is really a precipitous, wet, and slippery downpour which not only is connected to the low class culture in poor neighborhoods and local cafes, popular in Iranian cinema of late 1960s, but also can communicate with other cultures. Lets review the essential events: a stranger enters to a closed society and rents a room. All the locals, in a collective movement, see him as a stranger. There are also other elements: Hekmatis defeat in his first battle followed by his victory in the second duel, or when he and his rival, hero and antihero, are drunk before the final confrontation. Can't you see traces of western movies in this movie?

Downpour, however, is full of stories and events that are marginal in comparison to the main story: an old woman whose son feels ashamed that he is still living with his mother, a mother whose hands are still Knitting even after her death, a dressmaker who believes that high-class people used to be her customers and as such she is still waiting for them, a little lonely boy whose playmates are crickets. The rich lively texture of this drama, and the life of its people are all composed of these subsidiary details. So considering all of these details along with filming in real locations, articulating contemporary social problems, and showing lower working class life, we realize that Martin Scorsese was right: the film has a touch of Italian neorealism. And Downpour falls on the borders of these seemingly irreconcilable worlds; it is a humble and independent movie, carrying fragmentary residues and memories of different films (from John Ford and his The Quiet Man to Roberto Rossellini), and is the outcome of the subconscious of a filmmaker who has learned filmmaking by watching films.

The fundamental concern of Beyzaie and his cultural/narrative origins, however, are ancient Persian resources: folklore, mythology, and eastern theatrical traditions in which imagination and emotions are as real as the tangible experiences of everyday, and this is against the standard, dominant committed realism of those days. The dominant taste was, more or less, akin to the realism and the films that deviated from the usual realism were rejected, even called annoying due to an imposed symbolism. But now, we can look back at Downpour from another perspective, and analyze its mixture of realism and imagination. From the opening scene, when Hekmati panics and starts to run after his cart which is rolling downhill with a porcelain candleholder on top of it, the film tries to ignore the cherished realism of those years. Here, we have an expressive film with a kind of camera deliberately wants to intervene in order to make an artificial atmosphere and to create a new perception of reality. If we accept this expressive narrative tone, we can explain other scenes more freely. When the children applause Hekmati at the school, as he walks on the armrests instead of walking on the ground, it seems that step by step he is getting closer to the theatrical stage. He walks on the air and flies beyond the stage that he has created. When the shadow of the high-class female customer is reflected in the dressmakers small store and the dressmaker smiles, we neither hear anything from the customer nor see her face, so we are left alone in the border between reality and illusion. Even in the scene where Hekmati and Atefeh (Parvaneh Massoumi) are alone in the park, we can never be sure if the children are really lurking there or if they are just an illusion created by the anxious and obsessive Hekmati. Contradiction in successive shots has created this uncertainty; in one shot the children are there and in another they are not. However, is there any difference? Hopes, dreams, and fears are as real as the world itself, they are not visible in reality, but they can be seen and experienced in cinema. From this point of view, it is not incorrect to consider the final sequence a nightmare, Hekmatis nightmare or perhaps the neighbors nightmare when Hekmati leaves. It seems that everything is symmetrical with the opening scene: the vivacious melody at the beginning has been replaced by a tragic tone; the mischievous children who constantly run from side to side at the beginning are standing with folded arms at the end, looking at the teacher with regret. People are perplexed and some of them are crying. Everything is ritualized like a funeral. The cart goes uphill this time to accompany Hekmati in his own twisting Calvary. A man with glasses carries Hekmatis belongings as the physical symbol of his blind destiny. Hekmati has become silent with a symbolic scar on his chest. At the moment of his departure, he has become a mythical icon for the neighborhood, a sacred victim. Symbolism is the inalienable part of nightmares. In this final nightmare, the narrative perspective is somewhere outside of the realm of ritual, to show us how we are still captivated by the old structures and mythical patterns, and how we live them and reproduce them unknowingly and unintentionally. The film can be read as a warning or an anticipation of the bigger things to come. Hekmatis neighborhood is reflected in his mirror while the audience is reflected in Downpour`s mirror. Some probably argue that despite the disturbing symbolic explicitness of the scene, Beyzaies voice is too strong for such warning. They might be right, but history showed us that Beyzaies voice eventually disappeared in those years of neglect.

Great artists live their works. Downpour after four decades has become Beyzaeis signature story. In the realm of Iranian cinema and theater, he has always been an isolated and strange artist. As a young student, he wanted to work on Iranian theater for his dissertation. However, his project was not accepted. So he quitted the university and began his own research which is taught in Iranian universities today. His knowledge of Iranian theater convinced academia to bring him back to the university, this time as a professor. As a director, he endeavoured to build an identity for Iranian theater by using the continuous tradition of ritual theaters which is neglected by false modernization, and he also tried to use some of the key ideas of our traditional theatre in cinema (especially about time and space). He continuously read, wrote, taught, and researched, but he was never appreciated. After Iranian Cultural Revolution, he was expelled, then was banned from working in the theater for two decades. In the best years of his career, three of his feature films were banned and many of his scripts did not get a permission to be published, so the duration between each of his works got longer and longer. Disillusioned and dissatisfied he eventually left Iran. After five years, he has not returned yet. It seems that he has no intention of coming back. And we wonder how much more he has become like Hekmati.

Translated by Mehdi Pilehvarian