Fireworks Wednesday (Asghar Farhadi, 2006) (Patreon)

Objectively "good," just not for me. The thing that has impressed me so much about both A Separation and The Past, and to a lesser extent The Salesman, is the way Farhadi articulates some very writerly, theatrical maneuvers with subtle, skillful direction. At first, the use of transparent and translucent partitions and barriers within the open-concept apartment in A Separation seems precious, like an overtly literary conceit. But once the film gets going, the aptitude with which Farhadi glides through the space, halts abruptly, and then the editing brings us up short to a new, jarring point of view, is simply undeniable.

While it is certainly unfair to compare Fireworks Wednesday to Farhadi's consensus masterpiece, it does display certain similarities, as though the earlier film might retroactively be considered a practice run for the later one. Much of the action takes place in and around an apartment, the drama centers on a couple at a crucial point of contention, and the deadline of an impending trip serves to ramp up the anxiety among all involved.

As the innocent outsider who gets drawn into this knotty scenario, Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti) is a bit of an underwritten character. We understand that what she is witnessing gradually wears away at her idealism regarding her upcoming nuptials, but I agree with Mike that we simply don't see that reaction from Rouhi. Instead, she seems more like a naive busybody, unwilling to take any of several opportunities to split the scene, not because she wants her chador back but because she's invested in the soap opera. What's more, Farhadi misses a chance to articulate Rouhi's class position with respect to Mozhdeh (Hedye Tehrani) and Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad), a critical opportunity he doesn't squander in A Separation.

But my main qualm about Fireworks Wednesday had to do with its tonal awkwardness. Farhadi is obviously grappling with weighty matters -- not just infidelity, but the way that the typical deception that goes along with it seems to map so neatly onto Iranian patriarchy. (Mozhdeh is frequently chastised by outsiders for disrupting a solid marriage to a "good" man.)  But as the inconsistencies pile up, and Rouhi gets more and more involved, and physical elements like the broken buzzer and the call-ID start to play a more crucial role, Farhadi paces Fireworks Wednesday a bit like a breakneck farce. The camerawork and editing around the apartment, in particular, are often brusque and discombobulating. 

Now, granted, this is a relationship falling apart, in an apartment being painted,with a broken window. So everything is in disarray. And there are firework blasts going off in the background. I get that chaos is the order of the day. (Pace Ben Geisler, I don't need a roadmap.) But there should still be some, I dunno, sense of gravity about all this, and it felt a bit like the formal strategies suborned Morteza's implicit claims of Mozhdeh's hysteria. Fireworks Wednesday struck me as a feminist film on paper, but on screen as unintentional formalist gaslighting.