Directed by Rafi Pitts. Starring Rafi Pitts, Mitra Hajjar, Ali Nicksaulat, Manoochehr Rahimi, Ebrahim Safarpour, Hassan Ghalenoi Club, IFI members, 90 minutes
ALI (Rafi Pitts) is a former prisoner who works as a night watchman. We know that he has cause, as part of his duties, to discharge his weapon occasionally, though we can never say for certain who or what his targets might be. We also know the titular protagonist’s job has been keeping him from spending quality time with his wife and six-year-old daughter. One morning he comes home to find his family has disappeared. Hours pass as he waits at a police station only to discover that his wife has been accidentally killed in a shoot-out between “insurgents” and security forces. Many more hours pass before he learns the fate of his still-missing daughter. No wonder the chap goes postal.
For at least an hour, The Hunter has the makings of an angular modern classic. There are touches of The Conformist and Miller’s Crossing in the forest scenes. There’s a whole lot of Kubrick in the match cuts. Even the film stock adds a certain post-classical Hollywood gravitas; one half expects a leaner, younger Jack Nicholson to wander in to the frame. Unlike his American counterparts of the 1970s, however, Ali is no hip existential dropout but a genuine victim of political oppression.
For most of the running time, Rafi Pitts (who takes the lead role in a film he also wrote and directed) keeps the related polemic on the lowdown. There are glimpses of political subtext in the bankrupt bureaucracy and warnings on the radio for the locals to accept things as they are and not to worry about how things ought to be.
A final incongruous act, however, rather lets the side down. We might not have minded the intrusion of a Beckettian Mexican stand-off if it didn’t sit so very badly against the minimalist Iranian drama that went before. It’s all very well to take figurative shots at president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it’s something else entirely to prattle on as indecorous allegory.
In common with fellow nationals Abbas Kiarostami and Samira Makhmalbaf, Pitts makes terrific use of the medium-long lens in a series of tableaux, where each shot carefully telegraphs alienation against a backdrop of stark inorganic architecture.
It makes for a continually good-looking film, even if next time around (to paraphrase Godard), the talented Mr Pitts would be better off sticking with a guy and a gun.
