Marathon (Amir Naderi, 2022) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Michael Ewins

I watched Marathon a full eighteen years ago. That's a pretty brutal factoid to face, and in a way this is the ideal film to revisit from that period. I was just starting to take cinema seriously as an intellectual pursuit, and Marathon is exactly the sort of small film I would never have seen were it not for my desire, at that time, to keep track of the Manhattan movie scene. (This opened commercially at the Quad.) In fact, it's probable that I would have forgotten Marathon entirely, were it not for my pathetic little website where I jotted down sub-Letterboxd reflections on my viewing. For what it's worth (not a whole hell of a lot, really), here's what I wrote about the film back in '04:

A semi-experimental, semi-narrative hybrid that doesn't have the courage of either conviction, Marathon is nevertheless strangely engrossing.  The story, such as it is: today's the day that Gretchen (Sara Paul, who resembles a slightly younger Tina Fey) spends 24 hours riding the  subway and trying to work as many crossword puzzles as she can, attempting to beat her personal best of 77.  Much of the film (shot in crisp if unspectacular black-and-white video) consists of well-composed views of the New  York subway system, tunnels, tracks and trellises, resulting in a brief [film] stranded between a solo portrait of tormented private compulsion and [a] bland city-symphony.  The puzzle contest is intriguing due solely to Paul's  performance, since the joke (I suppose) of the film is that we're watching someone do something utterly uncinematic.  She carries it off, wavering between OCD satisfaction and total psyche-out; regrettably Naderi adds needless layers of faux-complexity, especially the repeated intrusion of Gretchen's mom's voice on an answering machine. All the same, being a person with my own compulsions, I found it hard to fully divest myself from the minor drama of Marathon, and I did appreciate its  ambivalent conclusion.  Worth 75 minutes on the Sundance Channel, but  probably missable when it opens at the Quad in NYC next month.

I must sadly confess that this is the only Naderi feature I've seen. I'm aware that he is one of the few pre-revolutionary Iranian directors who managed to keep working after 1979, and that his 1984 film  The Runner is considered a key work in the Iranian New Wave. (He emigrated to the U.S. in the early 90s.) Marathon is the third film in a super-low-budget New York trilogy, and I admit I'm rather curious about the others. Looking at Marathon now, I see it less as trying to straddle indie narrative and avant-garde, and much more like such Kiarostami films as Five and 24 Frames. The story is absolutely negligible, and seems designed to produce as little formal friction as possible. Naderi is clearly more interested in exploring the five boroughs, exploring the cinematic possibilities of his adopted home.

Now, this limited plot could have been the result of improvisation. I'm not sure just how scripted Marathon was. But we can see just how blasé Naderi is about human interaction when Gretchen is accosted on the subway by a dudebro (Trevor Moore) who pretends to know her from somewhere. This interaction seems like it ought to be pivotal, showing how a young woman in public space is considered fair game by lecherous men. But once Gretchen gives him the slip, that's that. There's no feminist subtext, no lingering sense of danger. It's right back to solving the crosswords.

By the final "act," Naderi appears to have painted himself into a corner. So he has Gretchen repair to her apartment which, while not exactly an art director's depiction of mania, does visualize many of her neuroses. The walls are covered with half-worked puzzles, and there are stacks of reference books all over the floor, volumes that, when she has her inevitable meltdown, end up floating in her bathtub. On the one hand, Marathon admirably refrains from pathologizing Gretchen. She clearly has some mental health issues, but the general anxiety she radiates could be the result of any number of afflictions. (Personally, I thought the puzzle-thon looked like a strategy for overcoming agoraphobia. But we never really know.)

But on the other hand, this ambiguity underscores just how little is at stake in the film's characterization of Gretchen. She is a structural node. She is performing a series of tasks (or failing to do so) as a way to organize film time for Naderi. This is why the periodic messages from Gretchen's mom (Rebecca Nelson) are the weakest aspect of Marathon. They suggest that Mom was also a marathon puzzler, and that she passed this trait down to Gretchen while also passive-aggressively insinuating that she will never be surpassed. This implication of generational trauma is just left to lie there, illuminating nothing.

So back in 2004, I found these loose ends too irksome for me to really embrace the film. And while I would still make no grand claims for Marathon, I appreciate it more as a kind of exercise for Naderi, leaving Iranian cinema behind and trying to find his inner Jim Jennings.

(SIDENOTE: As a puzzler myself, I found it off-putting how Gretchen is shown working puzzle after puzzle indiscriminately, with no controls for quality or difficulty. The New York Times Sunday crossword is featured along with middling grids from the Sun and Daily News, as well as moronic time-wasters from the TV Guide. Have some self-respect, Gretchen.)