User Reviews

Winner of the 2013 Venice Horizons Award Special Prize, Shahram Mokri's second feature Fish & Cat (Mahi va gorbeh) is a tour de force thriller realized in a single tracking shot in collaboration with veteran cinematographer Mahmud Kalari (A Separation, The Past).

College students from a Tehran university converge on the shore of a remote lake near the Iran-Iraq border ("a place of spirits and sprites") for an annual kite-flying festival, innocent of the plans of a trio of locals to slaughter one of them to provide human meat for a derelict restaurant.

"The story I'm about to tell you seems like a fable, but it's true" -script, Fish & Cat

Though the DPC version screened at MoMA was not the best, the film left a deep impression by means of expert writing, direction, cinematography, sound design, and music, and a closely choreographed mise-en-scène realized by a large ensemble cast, with several standout performances.

In a script that could have been a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and George Romero, Shahram Mokri employs an encyclopedic knowledge of horror-film tropes to fashion a profoundly moving essay on the futility of resistance against fate in the prison-house of time. Even an angel messenger ("He does things that are like miracles") is an impotent observer while on the shore of this lake and adjoining forest where the dead and the living, ghosts and spirits, meet and meet again. We are often left wondering, "How did they do that?" Some reviewers have complained about the 2-hour-plus running time. On the contrary, I say Fish & Cat would ideally be screened on a continuous loop running at least twice, from a winter afternoon to dusk.

The film also benefits from the work of Christophe Rezai (music) among others.

In the Caspian region, students have gathered for a kite-flying event during the winter solstice. Next to their camp is a small hut occupied by three cooks who work at a nearby restaurant, a place that serves human meat on the menu. Meanwhile, the space-time loop within this film both gives away the ending and also makes it seem suspenseful at the same time. And here's one more thing that makes this break from the pack: The entire movie is one single 140-minute take.

Director Shahram Mokri said, "I like the paintings of Maurits Escher, where you can see a change in perspective in the same visual. In my film, I wanted to give a change in perspective of time in one single shot. So the idea for the film came from his paintings."

Consider this an Iranian Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet one where we don't see the horror of cannibalism yet feel it even more, if that's possible. What a wild film.

Gosh I live in such rich disappointment. When I encounter someone who naturally understands cinema and who has the potential to affect me, I want him/her to. I want love to follow beauty.

This is an extraordinary film, unique in my experience. It happens in what we think of as real time with no edits. The camera is always on, following someone at eye height. The flow is continuous, yet we encounter many of the same events in this continuum but slightly different each time, never in a way that changes things. Tarkovsky did something like this.

We shift from dialog, often shouted to encounter points far away, to inner narration to 'direct to us' narration.

The first encounter provides an extra loop from the offscreen past that overlaps, and this happens again in the middle, giving us the feeling of a fabric we cannot escape. The setting is a sparse wood, adding to the abstract tone. I was so completely captured, so completely in the control of this filmmaker, that I was prepared to encounter something beyond. Oh how I wanted this. It never came, and in fact the last five minutes are botched. We know something is going to happen but we oddly move from implication to the explicit, followed by an 8 1/2 inspired musical punctuation.

This also was a disappointment though hardly rare. Few filmmakers know how to leave us. This is a young filmmaker, and I will want to see what he learns about life; I fear he may not have much opportunity.

Which brings me to the extra dimension for me. I am an embarrassingly typical US viewer, though I am confident I understand ancient Persian history well. The primary cast here is young Iranians, university students on an outing. Such students play a different role in society than their counterparts in the West, but the major mismatches are much more profound.

That society is no more flawed, even ridiculous than ours, but it is far easier to see from the outside, and loop it back to myself. Small loves of course and small lives as well. Dread that conveys, and human-maintained desperation, not in the least self-aware. It is an added dimension for me, but not enough to save this film.

I almost wish for something less ambitious but which matters. But in all honesty I vacillate.

If you like Kubrick's shining, or The Others, or the legendary Primer. you will not forget this movie. This movie requires a patient audience, puts together the piece of the puzzle of time to get to the whole scope of the story but its amazing that they implement this whole story in one shot and it gives you a feeling of bad dream or a loop in the story. much like the characters who got cough in the loop of time forever, maybe until stopping the next crime through a tape recorder of some sort. Its a brilliant bloody movie without showing so much of the action but you can later assign each death scene ONE by ONE! and enjoy the story one more time by reciting the events.

The political layer of the movie was significant as well, students waiting to get out of country, Mahmoud whose numbers do no add up recently and the journalists who has become a prophet but yet its too hard to follow his leads.