Boycott = Baycot [NTSC]

Mohsen Makhmalbaf received international renown and attention in the 1990s with a series of films, such as “Salaam Cinema”, “Gabbeh” and “A Moment of Innocence”, that placed him in the forefront of stylists and artists working in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema. “Boycott” is an early feature, his fourth, made a few years after the Islamic Revolution transformed Iranian society. Heavily influenced by Costas-Gavras’ early radical films, in particular “Z”, the relentless action, violence and over-wrought acting of “Boycott” will come as a surprise to viewers who only know Makhmalbaf’s later work. However, though it does betray the serious strictures of budget and resources affecting Iranian cinema at the time, “Boycott” is nevertheless an engrossing political thriller about the suffering and disillusionment experienced by Valeh (Mohammad Kasebi), a revolutionary agitator in pre-Revolutionary Tehran. The film starts with Valeh’s comrades brutally killed by the Shah’ notorious secret police, SAVAK. Taken to prison, Valeh encounters a horrific brutal system of torture and dehumanisation. Concerned for the welfare of his wife and new-born child, Valeh finds himself being asked by his fellow Communist prisoners to take on a role as a martyr to the cause of liberation. But distraught for his family, fearful for his life and increasingly being driven insane by torture and solitary confinement, Valeh begins to reject the tenets of Marxism. Makhmalbaf was himself imprisoned under the Pahlavi regime, and Valeh’s intellectual trajectory from Marxism to Islamic radical spiritualism, mirrors the filmmakers own personal history as a working-class agitator who became a leading artist of the Iranian Revolution. Valeh’s spiritual transcendence is rendered obliquely, but unlike, for example, the spiritual cinema of Tarkovsky, spiritual concerns do not outweigh the importance of politics or of Valeh’s terror of his increasing madness. As the chilling final scene makes clear - in a stunningly executed balletic sequence which again recalls Gavras - the savagery of the Shah’s regime demands agitation and revolt. “Boycott” is a film that veers from moments of stark beauty to thriller melodramatics, but it is a crucial work in the development of a key contemporary director. In Farsi with English subtitles.