QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM THE RED SEA
[dropcao]p]T[/dropcap]he story takes place in Tajikistan, and it is spoken in Farsi, Tajik and Russian. A man dies while testing an illegal shotgun inside an antique shop. This event seems to trigger a string of loosely connected stories dealing with cinemas and fire weapons. Iranian director Babak (Babak Karimi) is working on his 40th movie, after the previous attempt culminated into the accidental death of the armourer and props manager – who was blown up “into a million” pieces by a faulty weapon. Sara (Hasti Mohammai) argues with her bossy husband. She has a fresh wound on her face and her head wrapped in bandages, after being involved in a mysterious car crash.
Various weapons are the used in order to trigger the plot, both literally and metaphorically. The events often terribly often, as the sound of a shotgun after the director has shouted “cut” reveals. Filmmaker Shahram Mokri, now on his fifth feature film directly alludes to the Chekhov’s gun (the narrative principle mandating that every element in the story is necessary). The movie opens with a text card: “if there is a rifle hanging on the wall, then it should be fired, otherwise it shouldn’t be hanging there”. The 47-year-old helmer and scribe (the script was co-penned by Nasim Ahmadpour) obeys the principle to the letter. He goes a step further, ensuring that the fire goes well beyond the story being told and into the film set.
The film set is often an actual film set, as the movie utilises the film-within-a-film device to exhaustion. There is enough room for multiple stories that overlap, or simply exist inside each other much like Russian dolls. At whopping 139 minutes (that’s nearly two hours and a half), there is no shortage of time for Mokri to experiment with his cinema language.
There are moments of humour, including a cast manager seeking a seventh niqab-clad extra, only to find out that the women should be “pretty”. A young and beautiful woman puts her “CV” forward: the file contains nothing but pictures. People and objects move of their own volition: a cork blows on Sarah’s head, just as a drawer slides open on her face. An unsuspecting little girl insists that people should be silent during the shoot. A person on a full-body black rabbit costume and another one on a white one make an appearance in the most unexpected of setting.
The various layers of this highly ambitious metatextual gumbo gradually fuse into one chaotic grand finale, consistently supported by Peyman Yazdanian’s cheerful and mildly disorientating score. Don’t try to join the dots and make too much sense of the individual developments: your undivided attention will not necessarily merit a coherent narrative. This is a bonkers movie, unabashed but also intoxicated by its inventiveness. Despite the film title, nothing in here black and white in here. Ultimately, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit is just too forceful in its multilayered ambitions and cryptic allegories. This comes at the expense of the drama. In other words, this is an intriguing film to be contemplated for its structure, not so much an enrapturing story with a moving denouement.
Black Rabbit, White Rabbits showed in the 5th Red Sea International Film Festival.
