Rhino Season

Monica Bellucci performing in an Iranian-Turkish film by one "alternative" Iranian director seemed like an unusual combination worth a try. Wow, Rhino Season is a striking, beautifully painful film. It's more the kind of work I would expect to watch on the big screen in FIC Xixón, but has also made a perfect experience when watched on my laptop on a Saturday night.

The last decades of Iranian history have been bitterly harsh, and this film radiates all that pain with such a strength and efficiency. The Iranian Revolution should have served as a warning to all those that 2 years ago supported and praised the "Arab Spring" revolutions. I was completely certain that such revolutions would do much more harm than good to the decent people in those countries, replacing the corrupt westernized dictators by hordes of Islamist beasts. Sadly, my gloomy predictions have proved quite true, and we've seen the fucking Islamists raise to power and start to impose their demented ideas on the population of Egypt, Libya and to a lesser extent Tunisia... All those progressive Arabs (women, social activists...) that joined the Islamists in the revolts should have had a bare knowledge of recent history and a basic ability to apply it to the present, they should have known that in Iran in the late 70's the communists made common cause with the Islamists to overthrow the Shah, only to be paid later on by the Islamist with death sentences, torture and prison...

The film is set against the backdrop of Iranian "revolution", showing the miseries brought about not only by the enforcement of Islamic oppression on the population, but also by the raise to power of a new breed of corrupt and ignorant officials that will use their new powers in even more despotic ways than their predecessors, torturing, cheating, humiliating... It's a deeply emotional film, necessarily slow, as the calm pace is needed to let emotions sink. A story where love is the cause of so much pain... a healthy love on one side that can't manage to get over the misery created by another obsessive, sick and twisted love.

The peformance by Monica Bellucci's and the 2 main male characters are simply perfect, transmitting pain and desolation in each of their looks and moves, but it's the photography what will really stick with you for a long, long time. It's really striking, breathtaking in many occasions, dark, intense, violent...
Summing up, an indispensable film to be both enjoyed and suffered.