MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Prince Ehtejab’ an Exquisite Look at a Despotic Dynasty

Bahman Farmanara’s elegiac “Prince Ehtejab” (at the AMC Santa Monica 7) takes us into the twilight world of one of history’s most despotic and decadent dynasties, that of the Qajars, who ruled Persia from 1795 to 1925, when they were overthrown by the military officer Reza Khan, the Shah of Iran’s father.

(To this day the priceless and gaudy Qajar jewels, on display at the Bank of Tehran, serve as a guarantee for Iran’s currency.)

The film immediately brings to mind “The Last Emperor” but offers a far more intimate, candid and probing psychological portrait of a ruler who has reached the end of his line.

In Farmanara and Houshang Golshiri’s adaptation of Golshiri’s story, the noble-looking prince (Jamshid Mashayekhi) and his beautiful wife--and cousin (Nouri Kasraii)--are overwhelmed by their guilty awareness of their brutal legacy as much as they are by tuberculosis. A film of memory that moves freely back and forth in time within the prince’s recollections, it gradually forms a mosaic as beautiful as it is tragic and as exquisite as a Persian miniature painting.

Its point of departure--its present tense--finds the silver-haired, haggard-looking prince sitting on a chair, the sole remaining piece of furniture in the salon of his Esfahan villa, a Victorian structure with exotic Persian motifs. His gloomy solitude is interrupted by frequent visits from a spiteful, blackmailing retainer (Vali Shirandami) who was left crippled when struck by the prince’s carriage many years earlier.

In the fragments of the prince’s memories we meet his tyrannical grandfather, who doesn’t hesitate to smother to death personally an unwanted illegitimate Qajar offspring. If their dark heritage has made the prince permanently melancholy, it has made his wife hysterical to the point of eventual craziness. The royal couple not only remind us of “The Last Emperor’s” Pu-yi but also of such other ill-fated rulers as Bavaria’s “Mad Ludwig” and Mexico’s deposed Carlota and her long decades of madness.

“Prince Ehtejab” was shot in a beautifully modulated black and white that matches a collage of vintage photos of several generations of proud, fiercely mustached Qajar shahs. Even more demanding than the roles of the royal couple is that of the princess’s loyal maid (Fakhri Khorvash), who is forced by the prince to assume the identity of his wife when she dies.

Ironically, “Prince Ehtejab” (Times-rated Mature for complex style, adult themes, some sex), which was made in 1974 but released only now, took the grand prize at the now-defunct Tehran International Film Festival, an event sponsored by Empress Farah Diba, whose own opulent dynasty was so soon to be overthrown.