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The Postman Will Lay in Wait Thrice
By Shadi Vatanparast
shadi@tehranavenue.com
August 2009
به فارسی بخوانيم
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A young woman ({Baran Kowsari}) is taken hostage by a young man ({Mohammad-Reza Forutan}) in a personal vendetta and taken to a house. The house looks as if it is half a century old. It is a three story house on each of whose floors we witness, throughout the film, the unfolding of events. Each floor has seen a mishap of a romantic, financial, or criminal nature that has taken place in different time periods. On the third floor, an aging Qajar era nobility ({Ali Nasirian}) is living with his wife ({Roya Teimurian}), a ws.film.805.postchi.71.jpgservant ({Leila Zare}) and the servant's young boy. Living under Reza Shah Pahlavi, their life has turned constricted and they are living a clandestine life in the house, waiting for the moment to flee the country. On the second floor lives a hoodlum ({Amir Jafari}), a member of vigilante groups, which have been historically enlisted by authoritarian states in Iranian politics to crush popular uprisings, with a girlfriend ({Pantea Bahram}). On the first floor are the aforementioned young woman and man.

There is no line connecting these three stories, as if all these characters live at the same time but without knowing about each other. It is only the servant's boy that visits all the floors, playing with his marble balls, and everyone knows and talks to him. The footstep of the boy, his shadow, the sound of his marble balls along with the music, creates the frightening atmosphere of the movie. Somewhere in the story, the hostage girl says, "We can't escape this historical hell that we have been trapped in," but it is not clear why she is saying this and how they have been trapped in time. Of course, we can always connect the house's condition to our current political impasse. Especially after the recent Election, we are also trapped in a historical maze, with social characters like the old nobility, the thug, the raped, the rapist, the servant, the wife and the girl each playing a role.ws.film.805.postchi.72.jpg

The story is not complicated. None of the characters are frightening, uncanny, or evil, though the movie seems to be critical of patriarchy (the relationship between the nobility and his wife and servant, or that of the young woman with his father or his detainer). Perhaps the strongest point of the film is the script, which is written much like a play, and is played out by actors that are famous in theater (Ali Nasirian, Roya Teimurian and Pantea Bahram) and add color to the acting.

There is another element connecting these three floors. The hostage-taker appears in three different temporalities: as the lost love of the nobility's wife, whose century-old picture we are shown; as the jailed beloved of the thug's girlfriend, for whom the woman has befriended the thug and whose half-century-old picture we see; and in the present as the girl's hostage-taker. Throughout the story, all three men (the nobility, the thug and the father of the girl) detest the appearance of the young man.

Many have tried to classify this film in the horror genre but in fact it is mystery and comedy together. Overall, though, it is a potpourri of several ws.film.805.postchi.74.jpgHollywood films like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, and Halloween but it doesn't strictly follow any of them. What it has earned the director is experience in this genre, in which Iranian cinema has produced but only two specimens. {Hasan Fathi} has directed many successful television series. This is his second feature and it has been well received at the box office.

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