March 22: Cold Breath (2016 – Abbas Raziji)

★★★★

The surprises keep coming out of Iranian cinema, and Abbas Raziji’s Cold Breath numbers among the more recent.  Who would have expected a film about changing gender identity to emerge from one of the most hardline theocracies on the planet?  And yet Cold Breath is just that.

It’s also more.  Raziji builds his characters and their situations very deliberately, keeping us involved in the movie and keen to understand connections.  First, we meet the principals with little explanation of the way they’re related, and we then learn some details of each ones’ life as we moved among them.  Cold Breath parses out this information, always just enough to draw us on to the next detail until a network of relationships emerges naturally.  It’s an experience of cinematic pleasure when details like Qasem’s tender care for his father eventually fit so aptly into his character and into the developing story.  The way storylines merge and divide in unexpected but logical ways also satisfies.  The direction the film takes at end is as perfectly consistent with what we've seen as it is unanticipated..

Cold Breath doesn’t shy away from melodrama, but Raziji uses it with deftness that that recalls the skill of the better directors of the late silent era.  For example, Maryam lives in grinding poverty, and when she discovers that her daughter Raha has cancer, she tries to give the child up because she can’t provide for her treatment.  It’s hard to imagine a more melodramatic situation, but Raziji sells it with effective direction and a strong performance from Bita Badran as Maryam.  The relationship between Raha and her brother Reza could similarly ease into sentimentality, but Raziji captures a touching sincerity as the older brother tries to protect and care for his sister.  Individual scenes, too, build to a deeply emotional intensity.  For example, as Maryam is overcome with emotion at a hospital, Qasem can only talk to her and reach toward her.  He can’t touch her to comfort her in public because the two aren’t married.  Cold Breath burns with such intensity and humanity.

Much of the heightened emotion in the film comes from the social actuality of contemporary Iran.  Oppressive poverty afflicts characters like Maryam and her family, while gender limits what some characters can do.  Homa, for example, wants to leave Iran, but her father holds her passport and won’t let her go; even Maryam’s decision to live as a woman is in part a result of society’s not accepting an effeminate man.    The film also shows a sharp class divide between the poor and the professional class when the affluent family that employes Maryam enters the film.  But love and compassion mitigate some of these factors, from Dr. Mansour and Qasem helping out Maryam to the tenderness between the children.  Cold Breath gives us an Iran of caring people in a harsh world.

The film is not without its drawbacks.  Sometimes it doesn’t give us enough information for us to understand characters’ motivations, and at other times, we wonder why a character like Nasrim is even in the film.  Occasionally, Raziji can’t maintain the balance between good melodrama and bad and tips into the latter, like by intercutting a cock fight into a fist fight between two male characters.  Cold Breath's blue and gray, desaturated color scheme works wonderfully, but the cinematography becomes attention-grabbing at times.  It’s not clear why we focus on colored chicks at the beginning of the film or that it’s necessary for the camera to tilt to a right angle a couple of times as Maryam smokes and moans quietly.

But little lapses and excesses hardly detract from this melodrama with a transsexual at the center.  The beauty in Cold Breath is the way the film combines grittiness, love and unexpectedly thrilling storytelling.

Atlanta Film Festival: Monday March 27, 9:45pm  at the Plaza Theater.