MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Hamoun’: Mid-Life Crisis, Iranian Style

Filmmaker Darioush Mehrjui’s “Hamoun” (AMC Santa Monica 7) is a male mid-life crisis drama that in turn illuminates what life is like in Iran today.

This well-wrought, beautifully-acted film and Mehrjui’s recent, equally critical social satire “The Tenants” are encouraging signs of an increasing freedom of expression in Iran.

A frustrated writer, part-time high school teacher of English and executive in a large import-export concern, Hamoun (Khosro Shakibai) is devastated by his wife’s announcement that she wants a divorce just as they are moving into a luxurious modern residence they can’t really afford. The catch is that in present-day Iran a woman, who has few rights under Islamic law in the first place, cannot divorce her husband except under special circumstances.

As usual, Mehrjui is compassionate and nonjudgmental to one and all but is very clear-eyed; it’s not for nothing that the wife’s psychiatrist reminds her that “it’s common for Iranian men to be terrorized and then to terrorize in return”--or that Hamoun means “The Desert” in ancient Islamic.

The film is a study in self-absorption; its self-tormenting, self-indulgent hero is so caught up in his sense of failure and frustration in a changing society that he is blind to the impact of his old-fashioned bombastic macho treatment of his wife (Bita Farrahi) and is less proud of her success as an artist than he is threatened it.

“Hamoun” is probably Mehrjui’s most stylistically ambitious film. In a sense “Hamoun” (Times-rated for adult themes) is Mehrjui’s “8 1/2” / “La Dolce Vita,” but even more it is the work of an artist who is his own man, regardless of influences, and who is attempting to come to terms with life in a society riddled with contradictions and uncertainties.