The Pres­i­dent

Some­thing a lit­tle unex­pect­ed from one of the key archi­tects of the Iran­ian New Wave, Mohsen Makhmal­baf, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing his pre­vi­ous, ultra lo-fi film, The Gar­den­er, involved him deep in philo­soph­i­cal dis­course with a small boy while the pair played with some mir­rors. In a garden.

The Pres­i­dent casts aside the whim­si­cal (albeit pro­found) poet­ics of clas­sic titles such as A Moment of Inno­cence in favour of an alle­go­ry that’s far more caus­tic and defi­ant­ly out­raged. It takes place in a grim, unnamed land, chron­i­cling the swift depo­si­tion of a mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor and his cute, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly brain­washed grand­son, as they are forced to flee the con­fines of their plush palace and receive a first-hand view of the coun­try they’ve decimated.

The film opens with the pres­i­dent demon­strat­ing to his young charge the extent of his pow­ers: they sur­vey their land at night from a high van­tage, and all it takes is a sim­ple phone call to have all the lights switched off. Then one more phone call sec­onds lat­er to have them all switched on again. This sequence is key, pre­sent­ing the alleged romance of mega­lo­ma­nia, that expe­ri­enc­ing a moment’s mag­ic at the expense of immense suf­fer­ing is some­thing a leader with that much polit­i­cal sway could nev­er ful­ly comprehend.

The Pres­i­dent, as played by Geor­gian actor Mikheil Gomi­ashvili, knows that the end is nigh, but is con­fi­dent that he’ll be spir­it­ed away to safe­ty before it gets to the point where he comes to any phys­i­cal harm. He is quick­ly proven wrong, as he and his grand­son (Dachi Orve­lashvili) are ambushed by the revolt­ing guards in their employ, and are forced to flee into the coun­try­side. Their ensu­ing jour­ney allows them to sur­vey the land once more, this time from dirt poor min­ing vil­lages, broth­els, decrepit shops, ditch­es, and final­ly a beach whose seafront pre­vents them from escap­ing fur­ther justice.

It’s strange to see Makhmal­baf mak­ing films with gun shots, blood splat­ters, spe­cial effects, heli­copter shots, and all those tech­niques asso­ci­at­ed with the genre thriller, espe­cial­ly as he’s proven in the past that he’s more than adept at pro­ject­ing these things in ways which aren’t so lit­er­al. The adult-child rela­tion­ship at the cen­tre of the film is its most inter­est­ing aspect, and Makhmal­baf man­ages to human­ise these depots with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly ask­ing us to sym­pa­thise with them.

The cli­mac­tic sug­ges­tion that a grass roots democ­ra­cy would be as cor­rupt and vio­lent as a mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship comes across as a mite cyn­i­cal, the idea that we could ever achieve free­dom and hap­pi­ness a polit­i­cal myth used only to dri­ve peo­ple fur­ther into the ground.