There is No Evil (Mohammad Rasoulof, 2020) (Patreon)

This was a pretty strong year for the Berlinale, and of course it appears even stronger in retrospect, given that there was no Cannes and the Venice lineup is comprised of a rather feeble selection of also-rans. But even back in March, a lot of folks were nonplussed by Mohammad Rasoulof's Golden Bear win. An openly didactic film that does not stack up against the director's more evocative efforts (Iron Island, The White Meadows), There is No Evil is not a bad film. But it is a somewhat obvious film, a set of stories on a very specific theme, engaging in a form of social commentary that is simultaneously direct and hemmed in. Whereas the Iranian government's actions against Jafar Panahi have made his cinema bolder and more experimental, the similar problems Rasoulof has faced have resulted in a muddled allegorical style that is symptomatic of the limits of expression within an authoritarian culture.

[SPOILERS BEGIN HERE]

The film is a four-part anthology, with each section in some way pivoting around the problem of the death penalty in Iran. Perhaps the single strongest section of the film is the first one, from which the omnibus takes its overall title. "There is No Evil" follows the afternoon and evening of a middle-class family as they go about their business. Heshmat (Ehsan Mirhosseini) leaves his place of work,  picks his wife Razieh (Shaghayegh Shourian) up from work, they make a stop at the bank, where Razieh has an unseen quarrel with the teller, and the couple then begin to bicker. They pick up their daughter from school, check in on Heshmat's aging mother, and then head home. Then, in the middle of the night, we see Heshmat driving to work again for the night shift. He makes tea in a small machine room, and when some panel lights turn green, he looks through a window and presses a button, releasing a platform. We see a row of dangling feet. Heshmat is a hangman for the state.

Although Rasoulof's essential argument about the "banality of evil" is hardly original, the unexpected conclusion of the first segment does pack a wallop, precisely because it is a logical formal conclusion to the meticulousness with which everything else has been depicted. "There is No Evil" strongly resembles the work of Asghar Farhadi, until is suddenly doesn't. The remaining three segments, however, are much more in the vein of mid-period Panahi in the sense that they function as parables about human culpability and action. They are not as well-constructed as The White Balloon or Crimson Gold, though, since Rasolouf implies the presence of narrative twists that we have no difficulty discerning instantly. In this regard, the film's didactic impulses seem at odds with more conventional notions of narrative plotting.

The strangest aspect of the final three segments of There is No Evil, though, pertains to the critique Rasoulof is actually leveling against capital punishment in Iran. While there is a clear undercurrent in the film that implies that the taking of life is wrong, the second and fourth segments, especially, hinge not on the problem of execution per se, but the fact that conscripted soldiers are often forced to serve as executioners as part of their mandatory military service. The third section shows how such a soldier's inability to refuse such an order eventually destroys his life. While Rasoulof certainly has a point -- what kind of a country forces ordinary people to execute fellow citizens? -- this also seems to mitigate There is No Evil's larger criticisms against the death penalty. Are we perhaps observing a film operating at the very outer limits of dissent?