MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tenants’ a Clever Social Satire That May Be Metaphor for Iran

Darioush Mehrjui’s “The Tenants” (Monica 4-Plex) is a fresh breeze from Iran, of all places. Social satire is not what one would expect from the Iranian cinema just now, and it’s all the more enjoyable as a result. What’s more, the humor of this film, said to be the most popular in the history of the Iranian cinema, couldn’t be more universal.

On the desert-like outskirts of Tehran there stands, virtually in the middle of nowhere, a seedy apartment house that gives fresh meaning to the concept of shoddy construction. Ceilings are falling, pipes are bursting, but Abbas (Ezatolah Entezami), the paunchy, middle-aged manager, has reasons of his own for not only not making repairs but also forbidding the tenants to do so themselves.

Sure enough, the fur starts to fly, with much shouting and fisticuffs and lots more people getting into the act, such as disgruntled repairmen who discover that no one is willing to pay them and several unscrupulous real estate wheeler-dealers.

Yet, amid the almost nonstop bombast, we realize that Mehrjui is viewing all these people in the round, with compassion and without passing judgment. That the tenants are in the right and Abbas is in the wrong does not prevent Mehrjui from illuminating the foibles of human nature in one and all and, beyond this, celebrating everyone’s fundamental humanity. The film runs a bit long for a comedy, but its extra time is well spent.

On the surface, “The Tenants” is a surprising film for Mehrjui, a top Iranian filmmaker for two decades, considering the somberness of the two films, “The Cow” (1968) and “The Cycle” (1974), for which he is known in the West. The first deals with the dependency of a peasant (also played by Entezami) upon his cow, and the second, a masterpiece in the Neo-Realist style, tells of an old man and his grandson who come to Tehran in the last years of the shah’s regime only to become destroyed by its corruption.

If in that film the old man becoming forced to sell his blood takes on a clearly critical symbolism, can we not then take the apartment house of “The Tenants” (Times-rated Family) as a symbol of the state of contemporary Iranian society? Master of allegory that he is, Mehrjui shrewdly leaves the answers up to us.