Iron Island (2005)

Memorable, crazy movie

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

You will not find a better metaphorical study of Post-revolution Iran than this film, one so threatening that the Iranian authorities tossed famed director Rasoulof into the brig. A self-absorbed captain of a stalled and sinking ship runs his vessel like a clueless despot, ripping off hard-working but naïve passengers. Exploited onboard youth get meaningless education, and a lovelorn adolescent who bolts for a better life gets tortured, mostly to deter other kids. The lying captain inefficiently uses the scant ship resources, like steel and oil, and misapplies the proceeds to strand his impoverished subjects in an arid land. There is a bud of hope at the end, but like reality, if you blink you will miss it. AfroPixFlix drops a 10-forked anchor.

This is an ingenious, scathingly ironic, highly critical allegory about conditions today in Iran, written by the director, Mohammad Rasoulof. Nearly the entire drama takes place on an old, disabled oil tanker that is very slowly sinking into the sea. The ship is crammed with people of all ages and varying life stations, though there does not appear to be anyone on board who's rich.There are also animals, people tending vegetable gardens, a cleverly rigged cell phone service. Everyone is put to work, has a role to play. A wheelchair bound young man with cerebral palsy manages the rickety lift that transports people and goods up and down to the water line. A youngster ("Baby Fish") picks up small fish trapped below decks and returns them to the sea.The enterprise is run – better, micromanaged - with an iron hand by Captain Nemat (Ali Nassirian). He's everywhere: checking out every worker on the job, greeting newcomers and settling them in, brokering marriage contracts, tending to the needs of the ill and impoverished, ordering tools and goods from the mainland on his cell (he's the only one aboard with a personal phone), dickering with the ship's owners, who want to evacuate everyone and sell the old hulk to a scrapper.Unbeknownst to them, a major source of income for this floating colony is torching away pieces of the vessel and selling them to a scrapper. The costs of goods like purchased food and medicines is deducted from people's pay, like a company store operates.There is a school aboard ship, run by an enlightened, middle aged teacher who is keenly resourceful. For example, he makes his own blackboard chalk sticks using old bullet casings for molds, a marvelous spin of the traditional image of turning swords into ploughshares. This school is no madrasa: he teaches natural science and the 3 R's to a coed lot of kids of all ages (a family arrives with three teen daughters, none of whom has ever been to school, the teacher quickly learns).Capt. Nemat is not happy about this school or its teacher's ways. He bickers with the teacher about the latter's measurements that demonstrate how rapidly the ship is sinking: at the rate he estimates, it will only stay afloat for a few more years. Nemat dismisses this as a spurious finding. He finds any pretext to interrupt classes. One day it's a ship-wide celebration. Another day it's a need for the kids to aid in a special work project. Still later Nemat insists that two donkeys must be housed in the classroom.Nemat also insists that women wear burkas, and have traditionally arranged marriages. He metes out harsh punishment to those who transgress the rules, like young Ahmad, who keeps hitting on a girl Nemat deems too good for him, and who later tries to escape the ship. In an act of obvious defiance, the teacher, displaced by the donkeys, draws a chalk face: a woman without a burka.A major breakthrough occurs: workers are finally able to tap into the oil reserves tanked below decks. Oil in partly filled drums is floated to land and sold. But even with that development, Capt. Nemat cannot fend off the evacuation demands of the ship's owners. So he forces everyone to grant him their powers of attorney in order to wheel and deal on their behalf as he chooses. His choice is to have everyone leave the ship, but not in order to end their isolation.Quite to the contrary, Nemat directs his people to establish a new home, far removed from civilization, on a bleak patch of desert. They will start over, from scratch. The metaphor for a logical conclusion to radical Muslim fundamentalism could not be more clear.Subject to the usual caveat that everybody shouts at the top their lungs, even when standing nose to nose, a style that is common and annoying in Iranian film dialogue, this is a sensational film, and one can only marvel that it was made in the first place, let alone exported to the West. My grade: B+ 8/10.

"Iron Island (Jazireh ahani)" vividly works on at least three levels. Opening with a prayer, the premise itself is visually arresting and the story is simple but imaginative. Settled on an abandoned oil freighter off the coast of an unnamed Middle East peninsula, a rag tag community of squatters is ruled by a wheeling-dealing landlord, a benevolent, Messianic dictator of a captain, like out of a Werner Herzog film, controlling a limited barter economy with the outside world. The huge hulking ship in the bright blue sea is eye-popping, but it even feels like writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof is just pointing his camera at at a documentary of how traditional families adapt to such a physical and economic environment while retaining their social structure with its rigid gender and age stratification. I equally believed, on the one hand, this could be a post-apocalyptic society as in the "Mad Max" movies or "Waterworld", the new "Battlestar Galactica" or even "Land of the Dead" or, on the other, that it could even have been based on a true story, as much as "Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)" was based on a real incident in Japan of abandoned children.But it works equally well visually, emotionally and intellectually as a brilliant allegory, not necessarily of Iran but of any traditional, isolated society with a rotting infrastructure, selling off its resources and émigrés to global capitalism and living off the promises and lies of its paternalistic leaders.Working under the captain's watchful eye, the frustrated school teacher, a Cassandra-like scientist, uses the Islamic madrassas style of repetitive memorization. But with only old newspapers about a mysterious war and enemy as texts, the students are required to repeat truisms about the glories of living on the sea. Unfortunately, the English subtitles do not translate what is on the black board so some subtleties are doubtless lost.Just as any society has channeled restless adolescent boys into armies, the "Captain" (a marvelously oily and charismatic Ali Nassirian) organizes the boys on board into teams of coordinated manual labor to salvage resources on the ship that have the breathtaking look of "Nanook of the North" teams ritualistically pulling together for a common goal and their choreography is a wonder. Even so, they still keep trying to get snatches of contact to the outside world with satellite TV and radio.But we get caught up on in the story of one of these adolescents, his assistant, a lovelorn orphan (played by Hossein Farzi-Zadeh who also movingly played a similar young man in "Beautiful City (Shah-re ziba)"), who stands up to him, recalling "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", or a more cerebral "Star Wars", with an even more dramatically wrenching rebellion. How young love finds an outlet even through elaborate burhkas is a touching tribute to the universality of the human spirit. The audience held their breaths as to who would win the battle of wits and endurance.Women are especially ground under in this patriarchal society, with physical and labor restrictions and barely puberty arranged marriages around issues of honor. A lack of health care particularly affects the constantly pregnant, child-caring women.The premise doesn't make 100% practical sense and the ending is so ambiguous that the guy next to me optimistically thought it was happy for all, while I was cynically dismayed. But the images are unforgettable.

A fascinating film about a couple of hundred people living on a rusty, abandoned cargo ship stranded on a shoal off the coast of Iran. A fictional story that also works as a revealing documentary about how a community can organize life in such an unlikely place. Captain Nemat rules unchallenged over the residents: divvying responsibilities, dispensing medicines, organizing marriages, etc. He is the primary character, but the star of the film is the ship. The remaining oil in the tanks is drilled and pumped out to be sold onshore. The barrels scene that explains it is mesmerizing. In an ironic touch, the innards and unessential structures are being cut to be sold as scrap metal. Oil and metal thus form the two main sources of income. Those of course are finite. Moreover the ship is slowing sinking into the shoal. The days of the community on board are numbered. Nemat is well aware of this though he tries to hide the fact from the residents so as not to alarm them. But Nemat has a plan whose execution propels the story to an unsettling conclusion.There is a Romeo and Juliet subplot with a forced marriage that makes us suspect Nemat. When Nemat makes a deal to sell the ship for scrap and claims that the money will be used to relocate the community to a site on land, our suspicions increase. Is he going to run away with the money? The ending, especially the final scene with the "Fish" boy, is not immediately apparent, but upon reflection it is a pointed commentary on the future of the community as it relocates from its iron island to an arid stretch of blanched earth. A fish stranded in a small and shallow tidal pool is freed by "Fish", but he quickly realizes that several feet away, a line of unmanned fishing nets planted a short distance from the shore await. Well done!