Pari

By: Dariush Mehrjui

Dariush Mehrjui's 1th movie, Pari, is the predictable continuation of his new style after Hamoon, Banu and Sarah. Pari is particularly in some ways similar to Hamoon. The main theme of this film is still the same confusion and intellectual disillusionment with which the protagonist in Hamoon is preoccupied. 

In a scene in Hamoon, the protagonist hives J.D. Salinger's book, Franny and Zooey to his beloved one. This book later becomes the pillar stone of the screenplay for Pari. 

The film's story is about a young girl, Pari, who is bored with the world around her. She decides to follow the footsteps of her elder brother, Assad, a seemingly ascetic who had committed suicide. Her other brother who has left behind this stage of life and has reached some sort of a mental balance tries to help Pari towards some sort of a balance and adjustment. 

Like Abbas Kiarostami, Mehrjui is a film director of the pre-revolution generation who has been also successful in the post revolution years. Mehrjui guarantees his film's success by portraying a private life in a film that can be also successful at the box office. Mehrjui proved to know the way how to do this after The Tenants and Hamoon. Sarah was a turning point in the same direction and Pari too, will probably repeat that success. His personal adaptations of works by Ibsen and Salinger has made him quite popular with film critics. Mehrjui who was fond of Bunuel and Fellini before Banu, has turned to Bergman's style. Close-ups and fades are rather abundant in his new films. 

Another difference is that before the revolution Mehrjui seemed to be more interested in philosophical topics, but later he seemed to have abandoned the interest in films like The School We Went To, The Tenants and Shirak. In his more recent films, however, Mehrjui has returned to his old philosophical interests. In the meantime, his characters have become more sophisticated and more religious (The women in Sarah and Pare are seen in full Islamic veil). This has made Mehrjui's films most welcomed by the government officials of Iranian cinema. Hamoon, Sarah and Pari won several awards at various editions of the Fajr film festival. 

One of the highlights of this latest film by Dariush Mehrjui is the performance by Niki Karimi who had also successfully appeared in Sarah for which she won major awards at Nantes and San Sebastian. 
 
 

Pari (1995)
Iran 1995 Color

Language: Farsi
Runtime: 115
Directed by: Dariush Mehrjui
Cast (in alphabetical order)
Niki Karimi....Pari
Khosro Shakibai....Khosro Shakibai
Written by: Dariush Mehrjui, J.D. Salinger (novel Franny and Zooey)
Cinematography by: Ali Reza Zarrindast
Music by: Keivan Jahanshahi
Film Editing by: Hassan Hassandust
Produced by: Dariush Mehrjui, Hashem Seifi
Other crew:
Abdollah Eskandari....make-up
Majid Eskandari....make-up
Faryar Javaherian....set designer
Sasan Nakhaf....sound recordist
Asghar Shahverdi....sound recordist
Reza Sharafoddin....special effects

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eye WEEKLY                                             February 1 1996 
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday 
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NSCREEN review PARI

Starring Niki Karimi and Khosro Shakibai.
Screenplay by Dariush Mahrjui based on
J.D. Salinger's novel Franny And Zooey.
Directed by Dariush Mahrjui. Arabic with Subtitles.
(STC) Feb. 2, 9 p.m.; Feb. 4, 7 p.m.; Feb. 6, 9 p.m.
(Part of the Second Iranian Film Festival, Feb. 2-7.)
Bloor Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W. 532-6677.
by CAROLYN BENNETT

A chance to see a festival of Iranian films doesn't come around every day. In
fact, the last one was six long years ago. If Pari, an intellectually
ambitious work about a young woman's quest for life's meaning -- based on
J.D. Salinger's novel Franny And Zooey -- is an indication, the festival is
well worth your while. Pari is a young Iranian woman who has given up a
fledgling acting career in search of The Big Answer. Through her studies she
stumbles upon "The Green Book," a sort of how-to spiritual guide written by a
fifth-century Jojira mystic. She becomes obsessed by the book, experiencing
fantastic visions and religious ecstasy. The book was a gift from a beloved
older brother who committed suicide in a fire and Pari seems set on following
his fate. The bulk of the story lies with Pari's surviving brother, Dadashi,
who takes it upon himself to bring Pari back to reality. Beautifully
photographed and slickly directed (the film won veteran writer/director
Dariush Mahrjui, a UCLA philosophy grad, the Best Director award at the 1995
Fajr Film Festival and
Alireza Zarrindast the award for Best Cinematography), Pari is a stunning
visual journey as well as a refreshingly intelligent story. Characters debate
religion and philosophy. They get bent out of shape over bad art. They
recognize and care about the state of thought in society. What is doubly
compelling is that this philosophical and religious struggle comes from an
Islamic perspective and not the Christian view, as in Franny And Zooey. The
family dynamic, although a bit confusing at times, slowly reveals its
significance by the end of the film, as a small revelation brings the
mystical and temporal together. You may lose track of time watching Pari.
There are no Hollywood plot points every 20 minutes, no twists that spin the
action around. What you will do is revel in the beauty of the land and
appreciate another culture's religious and intellectual tradition -- even if
you don't completely
understand it. 
 

Salinger As a House On Fire

East Meets Upper East Side in an Iranian Adaptation of Franny and Zooey
Niki Karimi, Pharsi Franny
By Adam Pincus
There are lots of ways a film can connect with its audience, and PARI, a
high-pitched, elliptical tale of family dysfunction (to invoke distinctly
Western terminology), obsession and spiritual questing, gets over on the
strength of some unlikely dramatic elements. For the American audience, PARI
is helped in no small part by the resonance of its source material. It is,
without any apparent hint of irony, a literal adaptation of J.D. Salinger's
Franny and Zooey.

Salinger's Glass family is a ruptured clan of New York intellectuals, with
Ivy League genes and a sprawling, decayed Upper East side flat. The youngest
Glass generation -- the naturally talented, impossibly likable Zooey and his
more fretful kid sister Franny -- live in the long shadow of their brilliant
older brothers, Seymour (a honeymoon suicide) and Buddy, a underachieving
writer/professor at a small Eastern College. Weaned on Buddhism and the Life
of Mind, Franny and Zooey feel somehow tainted by this melancholy
 intellectualism. Now young adults, they can't help believing they've been
raised as "freaks," removed from the carefree bluster of their smart-talking,
self-serious peers and the dew-eyed sentimentality of their mother and
father. 

Not that they escaped either self-seriousness or sentimentality themselves;
Franny has recently discovered a religious text which acts on her striving,
hungry psyche like mystic pollution, and Zooey -- an actor and weary veteran
of the Quest trenches -- vacillates between jokesterism and zealous
disbelief. Both of them wish more than anything that they could just talk to
Seymour about all this. The elder brothers' room, littered with all manner of
high-minded detritus, remains untouched at the end of the hall, like a
shrine. For all Salinger's earnest faith in the Buddhist solution, Franny and
Zooey's talk of Bodhi somehow comes out wistful, esoteric and soft. They are
'50's kids, trying on exotic garb. There's a gentle humor and a fondness for
the characters and their yearnings, their crises, their illusions and
disillusionment. What a difference forty-odd years and one radical cultural
transposition make. The Iranian rendering of Salinger's characters might be
recognizable to someone intimately familiar with the stories, but it's wholly
inverted in tone and temperament. The opening half-hour -- that devoted to
the Pharsi Franny, here called Pari -- is overwhelmingly strident and
hysterical, as Pari pours forth all her feverish disquiet to her smug,
self-absorbed and thoroughly baffled boyfriend.Looking around the Hawaii
Theater, where most of the audience probably has little awareness of this
film's adapted source, you've got to wonder: do they have any idea what's
going on here? Can this film work on it own? In some ways, it can. 

PARI makes the most of the beauty of its star, Niki Karimi, whose luminous face projects all the youthful intensity and determined questing of her character. Khosro Shakibai, the AK 47 toting Zooey, who glides between bruising dogma and mischief, brings some of Salinger's sly humor back to the film. It comes as
welcome relief. The scenes between Shakibai and his mother perhaps come
closest to the spirit of the original, and the shift in tone helps give the
film some balance. Writer/director Darkish Mehrjui has chosen to incorporate
another Salinger Glass family story, "A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish" into
PARI, and the scenes of Seymour's suicide -- seen once in flashback and again
in a non-linear episode -- give a little dramatic heft to an otherwise talky,
abstract film. But in PARI, the quiet suicide of a intellectual melancholic
is again given a spin that is both more fierce, visual and visceral, and less
in keeping with the author's tone of gentle desperation. Assad (Seymour)
dowses himself in gasoline, lies down placidly on his bed and immolates
himself. It's a transposition that best sums up what's both interesting and
overwhelming about this film: the heat is there, but it's too often a scorcher. 
Niki, who took the Best Actress prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, translated the Salinger stories into Pharsi. "He has something in common with Herman Hesse," she said. "They are both interested in human beings more than story." So too PARI. Essential a portrait of youth in search of meaning and identity beyond the sometimes suffocating confines of family, PARI pays less attention to narrative drive, and so frequently bogs down in circular philosophical
conundra that, for two hours, can have the same effect as a late-night college bull session.  And nobody thinks that's all that interesting.