Iranian Director Returns With ‘Smell of Camphor’

“Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine” marks a triumphant return to the cinema after an absence of more than 20 years by Bahman Farmanara. He was one of the key directors to emerge in Iran in the ‘70s only to have his career cut short by the fall of the shah. (His last film, the 1978 “Tall Shadows in the Wind” had the distinction of first being banned in the shah’s regime and then by the ayatollah’s government.)

Farmanara lived in exile in Canada as film distributor, returning to Iran in 1989 to take over the family textile business and finding that every script he wrote would be rejected due to government censorship. Much to his surprise, he got a green light on this project, suggesting that censorship is relaxing.

Not literally autobiographical but clearly wrenchingly personal, “Smell of Camphor” has a bleakness relieved by very dark humor and by a recognition of the enduring capacity of individual kindness. This is a richly contemplative film, ironic, probing and revealing of life in Iran, both pre- and post-revolution.

Farmanara stars as a 55-year-old filmmaker with a serious heart condition who at last gets another chance to make a film, a documentary for Japanese TV on Iranian burial rituals. At least it’s a start. We meet Farmanara’s Bahman Farjami, who is chain-smoking and seriously pudgy, on the morning of the fifth anniversary of the death of his beloved wife. Farjami lives in a spacious, expensive home in a Tehran suburb, house-sitting for years for a friend living abroad since the revolution, and attended only by an elderly family servant.

Farjami sets out on his pilgrimage alone and along the way stops to give a lift to a woman clearly in distress. When she asks him to stop so she can get out he discovers she has left the corpse of her newborn child on the back seat.

This is just the first in a series of incidents that trigger memories for Farjami and comment on present-day Iran: the corruption and oppression in everyday life, and the plight of Farjami’s generation in general and the filmmakers of his time in particular. The word gets around that Farjami is planning a documentary on his own funeral, rounding up all his old actors--one ailing man was banned from the screen because in his pre-revolutionary career he sang and danced in his movies. The film deftly suggests that Farjami, increasingly depressed and in failing health, actually is beginning to envision his own funeral.

Farmanara carefully accrues incidents and encounters in Farjami’s life to bring the despondent man to an inescapable moment of truth.

As somber as much of this deceptively simple yet consistently acute, subtle and observant film is, an effect heightened by a carefully controlled use of color, it is not without hope--a hope embodied in the mere fact that so forthright and critical a comment on life in Iran after two decades of Islamic rule was allowed to be made in the first place.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: complex adult themes.

‘Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine’

Bahman Farmanara: Bahman Farjami

Roya Nonahali: Hitchhiking woman

Reza Kianian: Dr. Arsteh, the attorney

Hossein Kasbian: Abdollah, the servant

Mahtaj Nojoomi: Bahman’s Sister

Parivash Nazarieh: Farzeneh

A New Yorker Films release. Writer-director Bahman Farmanara. Producer Morteza Shayesteh. Executive producer Faziollah Yousefour. Cinematographer Mahmood Katari. Editor Abbas Ganjavi. Music Ahmad Pejman. Art director Zilla Mehrjouii. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

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