I couldn’t quite jibe with Manuscripts Don’t Burn, but I’m glad it exists. In fact, this film deserves support, even though it’s rattled by not-insignificant flaws. Director Mohammad Rasoulof is one of many Iranian filmmakers currently experiencing the squeeze of that country’s regime. He’s currently on bail awaiting a 1-year prison sentence (reduced from 6 years) for “unpermitted” shooting, and is banned from filmmaking for 20 years. He has resolutely said “nuts to this” by directing two films in secret since his ban. Manuscripts Don’t Burn, from its method of creation to its story to its Bulgakov-quoting title, is a work of defiance. And for that, it should be celebrated.
At its best, the movie rouses all the righteous bile you can tell swills within Rasoulof. The plot draws heavily from the “chain murders,” a decade-long period during which more than 80 dissident Iranian artists were killed or disappeared. It follows wheelchair-bound writer Kasra, who includes in his memoir the time he witnessed the botched attempt to engineer the deaths of over 20 intellectuals via bus crash. He believes he’s safeguarded himself against the regime by sending copies of his manuscript to two friends, and in any normal conspiracy thriller, he’d be right. But this film is fatalistically aware of the omnipresence of the authority, and all Kasra’s precautions have done is made more work for Khosrow and Morteza, the two agents assigned to silence him.
A half hour is what separates Manuscripts Don’t Burn from being great, perhaps even a masterpiece. Long, long, long stretches of philosophical soliloquizing break apart what could have been incredibly taut suspense. The film invites us to sympathize with Khosrow despite his monstrous acts by revealing that he works to earn money to pay for treatment for his ill son. This is established via an early phone call he makes to his wife and then repeated too often via many more phone calls. Nothing new is learned through such scenes. The same goes through endless speechifying about the evils of artistic repression. The plot does more than enough to get such ideas across – the didacticism only weakens it.
That being said, when the film is on point, it is tremendously effective. The covert shooting necessitated by the strictures imposed on Rasoulof has resulted in a terrifyingly claustrophobic experience. It is as nitty and gritty as film can get, lo-fi turned to the service of uncomfortable rawness. Khosrow and Morteza (meaningfully, played by Rasoulof himself) are effective not because they are movie-like super operatives. They work the way real-world servants of dictatorships do: by turning the resistance against itself. They get Kasra and his friends to sell each other out, undercutting the principles for which they stand in a disquietingly plausible way.
When it concentrates of the procedures of a surveillance state, Manuscripts Don’t Burn is up there with The Lives of Others in terms of gripping paranoia. It might’ve benefited from another round of editing, but who knows what constraints Rasoulof was operating under. At any rate, warts and all, this is a piece of work that needs to be disseminated and talked about.
2 thoughts on ““Manuscripts Don’t Burn” Worthy of Support In Spite of Its Problems”
MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE INDIAN EXPRESS, INDIA
Mohammad Rasoulof’s WORK “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” appears to be the easily the most daring and politically provocative film yet to leap from Iran. The film is of 125 minute duration and is classed one seems to have reminded of
something we clearly heard when visiting that country to study its cinema in the late ‘90s. When an Iranian cinephile
was asked the difference between Iran’s artistically vital but little known cinema of the 1970s and its successor Iranian Revolution, he just said, “In the post-revolutionary cinema, there
is no bad guy.”
If we scan the remark we are likely to find both banal and apt. Films before the Revolution are said to have often conveyed a pervasive sense of bitterness and discontent, a mood ultimately, traceable to one paramount bad guy: the Shah, whose overthrow was supported by the vast majority of Iranians at one time.
Indeed, Iranian films of the ‘80s and beyond, in contrast, frequently have projected the buoyancy of a culture reinventing itself, even when dealing with harsh social problems reflecting the content restrictions of the Islamic Republic.
Whenelements of discontent did surface with a force, in films such as Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “A Moment of Innocence” or Jafar Panahi’s “The Circle,” the targets were evidently the Ismalic hierarchy. The directors confronted the authority head-on. Such is power and aggression of the films that seem to have shaken the whole world.
Along with the film “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” though, the bad guy returns to Iranian cinema with avengeance. Based on real historical events, Rasoulof’s drama is a work that focuses on two operatives assigned to terrorize, torture and murder dissident
writers and intellectuals. In making such an intrepid film, Rasoulof takes a lunge in the ocean of fear uncertainty. These Kevin guys go about their dirty business with a methodical and ruthless brutality, though they are simply repression’s foot soldiers.
Far more chilling and rabid postures is their superior, a young guy, who works in an office, wears fashionable clothes, and seems to have no qualms about advancing his career by killing former friends.
We are awed to see how the film has the cauterizing mood by throwing a pace of a thriller. We first see Khosrow and Morteza (no names of cast or crew are given due to the film’s perilous
political nature) as they are leaving a job. With characteristic subtlety and ellipses, Rasoulof doesn’t show us the killings, only that Khosrow has a man’s bloody hand print on his neck, flesh of pond lacerated for a bad revenge cause.
It is followed by the most tense and creeps, Khosrow wants their next stop to be an ATM. He needs payment for his mayhem because he has a little boy who requires an operation. But an even greater problem may be his wife, who complains that their son’s affliction is punishment for his work. Here we have a touch of morality from his wife, a woman on the offence. Morteza, a stolid and unreflective assassin, shrugs it off, saying that their assignments are in accordance with shariah—the very
rationale that allows extremist elements in a government surely based on religion to slaughter their opponents without human pity and compunction.
While structuring the film Rasoulof interweaves the killers’ movements with the actions of certain men who will
soon be their targets. They are old and frail and though they understand their situation well enough to be afraid, though their spirits are still defiant. One has a manuscript that recalls an incident some years before when the security
apparatus tried to murder a group of writers by driving their bus off a cliff (this is evidently based on an actual incident from 1995). It is this manuscript that is the target of the two killers’ superior, a man who seems to combine the worst of medieval theocracy and modern technocracy.
It
is true in his earlier films, quite aggressive and pinching, like “Iron Island”
and “The White Meadows,” Rasoulof has deployed a distinct version of
the visual lyricism and quasi-mystical symbolism of other Iranian films.
“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” offers no such cinematic poetry. It is
bluntly prosaic, literal, nasty and almost shocking in a given the context.
One this is sure that Rasoulof here
doesn’t care about genre mechanics or
conventional narrative arcs. Judged by some standards, this is not a standard
political thriller; nor he wants to make it look like that It is an
unprecedented statement and damning analysis, an autopsy of not only the toxic
political and personal killing motives that underlie the current regime’s
murderous assault on dissentices.
MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE INDIAN EXPRESS, INDIA
Mohammad Rasoulof’s WORK “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” appears to be the easily the most daring and politically provocative film yet to leap from Iran. The film is of 125 minute duration and is classed one seems to have reminded of
something we clearly heard when visiting that country to study its cinema in the late ‘90s. When an Iranian cinephile
was asked the difference between Iran’s artistically vital but little known cinema of the 1970s and its successor Iranian Revolution, he just said, “In the post-revolutionary cinema, there
is no bad guy.”
If we scan the remark we are likely to find both banal and apt. Films before the Revolution are said to have often conveyed a pervasive sense of bitterness and discontent, a mood ultimately, traceable to one paramount bad guy: the Shah, whose overthrow was supported by the vast majority of Iranians at one time.
Indeed, Iranian films of the ‘80s and beyond, in contrast, frequently have projected the buoyancy of a culture reinventing itself, even when dealing with harsh social problems reflecting the content restrictions of the Islamic Republic.
When elements of discontent did surface with a force, in films such as Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry,” Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “A Moment of Innocence” or Jafar Panahi’s “The Circle,” the targets were evidently the Islamic hierarchy. The directors confronted the authority head-on. Such is power and aggression of the films that seem to have shaken the whole world.
Along with the film “Manuscripts Don’t Burn,” though, the bad guy returns to Iranian cinema with a vengeance. Based on real historical events, Rasoulof’s drama is a work that focuses on two operatives assigned to terrorize, torture and murder dissident
writers and intellectuals. In making such an intrepid film, Rasoulof takes a lunge in the ocean of fear uncertainty. These Kevin guys go about their dirty business with a methodical and ruthless brutality, though they are simply repression’s foot soldiers.
Far more chilling and rabid postures is their superior, a young guy, who works in an office, wears fashionable clothes, and seems to have no qualms about advancing his career by killing former friends.
We are awed to see how the film has the cauterizing mood by throwing a pace of a thriller. We first see Khosrow and
Morteza (no names of cast or crew are given due to the film’s perilous political nature) as they are leaving a job. With characteristic subtlety and ellipses, Rasoulof doesn’t show us the killings, only that Khosrow has a man’s bloody hand print on his neck, flesh of pond lacerated for a bad revenre cause.
It is followed by the most tense and creeps, Khosrow wants their next stop to be an ATM. He needs payment for his
mayhem because he has a little boy who requires an operation. But an even greater problem may be his wife, who complains that their son’s affliction is punishment for his work. Here we have a touch of morality from his wife, a woman on the offence. Morteza, a stolid and unreflective assassin, shrugs it off, saying that their assignments are in accordance with shariah—the very
rationale that allows extremist elements in a government surely based on religion to slaughter their opponents without human pity and compunction.
While structuring the film Rasoulof interweaves the killers’ movements with the actions of certain men who will
soon be their targets. They are old and frail and though they understand their situation well enough to be afraid, though their spirits are still defiant. One has a manuscript that recalls an incident some years before when the security apparatus tried to murder a group of writers by driving their bus off a cliff
(this is evidently based on an actual incident from 1995). It is this
manuscript that is the target of the two killers’ superior, a man who seems to combine the worst of medieval theocracy and modern technocracy.
It
is true in his earlier films, quite aggressive and pinching, like “Iron Island”
and “The White Meadows,” Rasoulof has deployed a distinct version of
the visual lyricism and quasi-mystical symbolism of other Iranian films.
“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” offers no such cinematic poetry. It is
bluntly prosaic, literal, nasty and almost shocking in a given the context.
One this is sure that Rasoulof here doesn’t care about genre mechanics or conventional narrative arcs. Judged by some standards, this is not a standard political thriller; nor he wants to make it look like that It is an unprecedented statement and damning analysis, an autopsy of not only the toxic political and personal killing motives that underlie the current regime’s
murderous assault on dissent voices.