Leila’s Broth­ers – first-look review

With the nar­ra­tive den­si­ty of a Russ­ian doorstop nov­el and the sear­ing inter­per­son­al insights of a psy­chol­o­gy text­book, Saeed Roustayi’s aston­ish­ing, near­ly-three-hour fam­i­ly epic cracks the tee­ter­ing stilts that are cur­rent­ly prop­ping up life in con­tem­po­rary Tehran.

There’s Stein­beck in there too in its depic­tion of poverty’s gross indig­ni­ties and a sys­tem that works to con­stant­ly beat you away from suc­cess. It’s like lit­er­ary art­house soap opera in the best pos­si­ble way, a film whose every frame and line of dia­logue is cal­cu­lat­ed to per­fec­tion, and the kind of cred­i­bly intri­cate plot­ting – with new reveals par­celled out like small gifts – that keeps you com­pelled (and then some) from the first frame till the last.

Taraneh Alidoosti’s Leila is the lone daugh­ter of pride­ful, opi­um-addict patri­arch Esmail (Saeed Pour­sami­mi), and has four idiot broth­ers: Pay­man Maadi’s Manouchehr, who’s keen to drag him­self out of penury by becom­ing involved in a fatal­ly dodgy pyra­mid scheme; Farhad Aslani’s Parviz, a layabout with five chil­dren whose pro­fes­sion­al aspi­ra­tions have peaked at toi­let clean­er; Moham­mad Ali Mohammadi’s Farhad, a mus­cle-head­ed wrestling fan who’s in thrall to the flighty whims of his father; and final­ly, Navid Mohammadzadeh’s cow­ard­ly Alireza, who Leila ear­marks as the one hope this trag­ic clan have for sal­va­tion, though she’s going to need to con­vince him of some very tough home truths before he can step up.

The plot involves Esmail’s burn­ing desire to be respect­ed by peers and elders who have humil­i­at­ed and abused him all his sor­ry life. He has been select­ed to become ​“fam­i­ly patri­arch” fol­low­ing the death of a cousin, and this role would final­ly see him rise up the ranks of the ad hoc hier­ar­chy, while hav­ing to pay a prince­ly sum for the priv­i­lege. Leila sees the tra­di­tion as pop­py­cock, and she’s not only des­per­ate for her hap­less father to avoid exploita­tion, but for his stash of 40 gold coins (worth tens of mil­lions of Tomans) to go towards the deposit for a shop in an up-and-com­ing Tehran mall that would allow her broth­ers to final­ly flourish.

Despite the title of the film, Leila isn’t the cen­tral char­ac­ter, and her can­ny manip­u­la­tions come in many cas­es from off cam­era. At points she appears as the lone moral bea­con of good sense, yet Rous­tayi does not allow any­one to emerge as a com­plete­ly sym­pa­thet­ic pres­ence (and vice ver­sa), as the rev­e­la­tion of secrets and the sud­den shifts in the sit­u­a­tion leave every­one open to crit­i­cism and, more often than not, on the brink of total failure.

The film is shot with unfussy pre­ci­sion, as best to cap­ture the nuances of the bril­liant ensem­ble. There are many scenes in the film with sev­en or eight peo­ple in the frame at one time, and it’s a small mir­a­cle in and of itself that Rous­tayi and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hooman Behmanesh are able to mar­shal and block the actors in a way that keeps every­one front-and-cen­tre to the action.

Yet it’s the screen­play here that’s the real show­piece, a sin­u­ous and live­ly com­pendi­um of epic con­ver­sa­tions and para­dox­i­cal argu­ments that are pitched to emo­tion­al and nar­ra­tive per­fec­tion. The amount of heavy lift­ing that Rous­tayi does to couch his nar­ra­tive shifts in a bedrock of cred­i­bil­i­ty is as astound­ing as it is enter­tain­ing, and it’s hard to see how his play­ers could’ve served this jaw-drop­ping achieve­ment in writ­ing any better.

Leila’s Broth­ers is an evis­cer­a­tion of the patri­archy and entrenched tra­di­tion that, at the same time, takes great pains to explain why peo­ple blind­ly cling to them as a kind of exis­ten­tial balm. The lilt­ing gen­er­a­tional shift, not to men­tion the con­stant spec­tre of death which hangs over the play­ers, only adds to the dra­mat­ic stakes, fram­ing this specif­i­cal­ly-cal­i­brat­ed tale of one family’s eter­nal woes as a grand fres­co of uni­ver­sal wis­dom. A knockout.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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