Mohsen Gharaei's Falling House played Thursday in Venice's Orizzonti section: a domestic drama in which an Iranian prison guard, crushed by the day job, comes home and locks his own family inside. [1] Xan Brooks, reviewing for the Guardian, called it a fiercely acted hothouse picture and a thinly veiled parable. Festival copy will file the family. The invoice is who gets a screen, and who still pays for the festival.
Wednesday this paper reported that Sergei Loznitsa called the European Commission's €2 million Biennale cut "a punishment in kindergarten" because the money funded cinema, not Russia's pavilion, while European firms imported 17 percent more Russian LNG in the second quarter. That cut still stands. An Iranian prison film is on the Lido anyway. The world desk this morning is on funerals and hull counts. Brooks is watching a bolted door.
Farhad Aslani plays Rashid Hafizhi, a low-level jailer falsely accused of aiding a jailbreak and facing eviction from a rented house. [1] Brooks calls him a burly bear who still carries bewilderment and defeat, "smart enough to know that everyone in the vicinity is just that little bit smarter than him." [1] Then his eldest daughter, Ensi, played by Laleh Marzban, says she will go to Turkey to work as a model. Modelling in Iran is a non-starter, she tells him. She has to cover her arms and neck, and the lights cut out mid-shoot. [1] For him, Brooks writes, it is a "bone-headed busman's holiday." For the family, "a nightmarish tragicomic staycation." [1] Rashid answers as a jailer. First Ensi is imprisoned, then his wife, Zitab, played by Rina Raminfar, then the youngest daughter. "This is my prison," he says. "And I make the rules." [1]
Brooks reads the house as the country. "Iran is a prison and everybody is inside: cons and non-cons; parents and their children." [1] That is the reviewer's sentence, not a war-desk lead. Outside, bulldozers prepare a housing estate. Inside, the guard becomes the wrecking ball, goaded by Ensi's modelling portfolio. Some of the lines land on the nose. "Rashid, I know you're in a bad place," Zitab wails as the house goes into lockdown. "How unlucky are we?" Ensi says. "The people coming to demolish our house are our only hope." [1] Brooks leaves open whether those are jokes, "judiciously deployed to lighten the glowering mood." The film, he writes, could play as anguished social realism or as absurdist black comedy. Gharaei "leaves the door ajar for an alternative parallel reading." [1] Escape is the only reasonable option. For that one needs money, a passport, and a key. [1]
Gharaei's previous picture, Without Everything, was a major box-office hit in Iran in 2021 and collected prizes at Fajr in Tehran. [1] Brooks expects a rockier landing for this one, "assuming it is permitted to land safely at all." It is "an angry, cornered beast of a movie, a rugged piece of old-school social realism." [1] He calls it more sturdy than the Hafizhis' frail house on the landfill, and sturdier than the broken family inside. [1] That is a programmer's risk, not a sanctions brief. The culture file is not whether the Gulf is on fire. It is that Brussels punished a cinema school over a closed pavilion while this title, about a man who cannot tell the jail from the kitchen, still found a slot in Orizzonti.
Loznitsa's complaint named Biennale College and the Venice Production Bridge as the line items that actually disappear. Falling House is the kind of picture those rooms exist to move: a domestic drama from a director whose last film pleased Tehran and whose new one may not. Festival MSM will still file a family picture. War Twitter will not watch it. The gap is the same invoice as Wednesday. The velvet rope around a closed Russian pavilion is the story art-world copy wants. An Iranian jailer locking his daughters in a rented house is what the Lido actually screened on day two.
A reader of only the pavilion fight will think Europe regulated Venice. A reader of only Brooks will think a family picture opened Thursday. Both are true. Neither restores the grant. The gas still moves. The prison-guard patriarch is on the Lido.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin