Movie Review: The Septembers of Shiraz

I am rarely interested in watching the movie installment of a book, but some books are better told more than once.

Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer is a book featuring the drama of a Jewish jewellery businessman in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, based on personal accounts. Sofer, an Iranian Jew, grew up herself during those years and explores this experience in her books. Her latest, Man of My Time, was one of my favorite reads this year for the maturity of the writing and the complexity of the approach of another topic set up in Iran, without the Jewish narrative this time.

I watched the movie based on Septembers of Shiraz on Netflix, part of the monthly subscription. The film is directed by the Australian-Aboriginal writer, actor and director Wayne Blair, with an exceptional distribution of actors playing very well their roles: Adrien Brody, Salma Hayek, Shohreh Aghdashloo among others.

As an observation, the film follows the original script based on the book although it gives to it a strong socially-oriented touch. It made sense and the references were inserted in a smart way. The only thing I was largely skeptical about was the frequent use by the Arabic ´yalla´ by the Revolutionary Guards, long before Iran started to mix into the Arabic-speaking lands (the events are taking place in the months of 1979, therefore, slightly implausible.

At a certain extent, there is a grain of sad reality in the confrontational reality created those months: the gap between the very rich and priviledged and the very poor and with no chance to challenge their condition. The relationship between Farnaz, Isaac´s wife, and her home keeper has a revelatory dynamic of the lack of content of the social relationships at the time of the Shah. Therefore, once the social and political realities changed the representatives of the less priviledged were able to state with the same cruelty afflicted to them by SAVAK´s torturers: ´now it was our turn´.

Besides the strong social message, the moral dilemma present in the book is maintained and the characters - no matter which side of the self-rightousness are - complex and beyond the black and white portraits. 

The cruelty is explicit and raw but it is the kind of violence that is far from being gratuitous. It is the sign of the new times which, after a generation swallow undefinitely almost everyone. 

Rating: 4.5 stars