Genre is a curse, because it encourages the lazy habit of critics to judge movies in relation to conventions rather than to imaginative possibilities. It’s a model only of what filmmakers should ignore and transcend, as exemplified in the film “Crimson Gold,” from 2003, by the Iranian director Jafar Panahi. (It comes to Film at Lincoln Center’s virtual cinema on Friday, in a new remastering.) Panahi’s film—based on a screenplay by the seminal modern Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, for whom Panahi had worked as an assistant—is a thrillingly original revitalization of the crime drama, inspired by reports of a real-life robbery of a jewelry store. It’s a film that owes nothing to neo-noir, the thriller, or the heist movie. It offers a radical new approach not just to its venerable theme but to filmed fiction writ large.
The movie begins boldly, in the midst of a violent robbery at a jewelry store in Tehran: the thief manhandles, berates, and threatens the jeweller and another employee; then an alarm goes off, a shot is fired, and a clamoring crowd gathers at the shop’s locked gate as the robber rampages destructively within. The scene runs nearly four minutes long, and Panahi films it in a single take, with the camera set at the back of the shop, facing the door and looking out onto the street. Much of the robbery is only heard on the soundtrack and seen only in fragments, as the characters pass through the frame, keeping the viewer’s attention equally on what’s going on outside, on the street. The crowd sees the robbery but doesn’t see itself; the viewer, by contrast, sees both in the same gaze, as Panahi symbolically links the events within the store to those in the wider world—connects the crime inextricably with Iranian society as a whole.
That connection is what the rest of “Crimson Gold” goes on to develop: it’s composed almost entirely of flashbacks of the robber and others in his circle in the days leading up to the crime. These begin with a double dose of Dostoyevskian themes: an unholy coincidence and a cynical philosophy. The robber is a pizza-delivery man named Hussein Emadeddin (played by a real-life pizza-delivery man named Hussein Emadeddin), whose partner in small-time crime, Ali (Kamyar Sheisi), zips through town on his motorbike and, joining Hussein at a grubby café, unveils some loot: a woman’s purse that he claims to have found. It contains a wedding ring and a jewelry-store receipt for a necklace, made in Italy, that costs, as Ali says, with uncertainty, “seventy-five and one, two, three . . . six zeroes!” An older grifter butts in, explains that it’s seventy-five million (Ali wonders, “How many months of work is that?”), and sits with them to declaim his philosophy of crime as an essential matter of “honesty,” teaching them to distinguish between poor women, whose purses it’s indecent—which is to say, not worthwhile—to steal from, and those whose bags are both fair and profitable game.
The hints dropped in this odd encounter—the links of sex and money, crime and corruption—soon come brazenly to the fore. A pair of scenes of Hussein and Ali riding together on Hussein’s motorbike are both centered on different forms of their male gaze. In the first, documentary scenes of pedestrians throughout the city focus on a variety of women whom the men, following their elder’s cynical counsel, evaluate for their aptness as victims. (Ali says, “Since that guy talked to us about purses, I look more at the purses than the women.”) In the second, Ali, who’s the younger of the two, again has sex on the brain, this time talking of it in regard to the ubiquitous sexual repressions of Iranian society. He asks Hussein whether it’s true that women used to go out “naked, without veils,” before the Islamic Revolution made wearing a hijab mandatory.
Throughout the film, the two men and Ali’s sister (played by Azita Rayeji; the character is never named) endure bitter humiliations on the basis of class—in particular, at the jewelry store where the found receipt is from. “Crimson Gold” is one of the most concentratedly work-oriented films of the modern cinema. Hussein’s purse-snatching jaunts with Ali are, in effect, his second job, but Hussein is filmed at great length, in extended sequences, doing his main one: delivering pizzas. Judging from the dim and tiny room, in a dilapidated building, where Hussein lives, the job is terribly paid, and his experiences and observations during rounds through Tehran make plain the extreme economic and social inequalities that divide the city. When a fellow delivery man suffers a grave motorbike accident, a man who lives under a bridge gathers and eats the pizzas that are scattered at the scene of the crash.
The ambient, imposed, and enforced taboos of Iranian society are suggested in myriad ways in “Crimson Gold,” as in Ali’s effort to procure a doctor’s note, without which his sister and Hussein can’t marry. (Presumably, it’s a certificate of her virginity, or perhaps of her non-virginity, as suggested in Ali’s remark that it’s “nice” of his friend to marry her.) In the movie’s most elaborate and virtuosic sequence, which runs for more than fourteen minutes, Hussein, while attempting to make a delivery to a luxurious building, stumbles upon the police staging a major operation to catch and arrest men and women who are attending a dance party in one of the apartments. The sequence is terrifying in the implacable repression that it depicts and the violence that it depends on, yet it’s also adorned with piquant dialogue. Hussein lightly mocks the chief and candidly asks a heavily armed teen-age officer whether he has ever danced with girls. There’s even more sardonic humor in Hussein’s undeliverable pizzas, which come to assume a strangely significant, humanistically sublime role. The mordant wit of this mighty sequence stands in for its higher, scathing irony: the absurd mislabelling of dancing as a crime and partygoers as criminals highlights the essential truth in the Dostoyevskian cynic’s view of purse-snatchers, authentic and self-aware criminals, as honest. An even longer scene, at an even more luxurious building, also involves illicit relations between men and women, and brings Hussein into unexpectedly first-hand contact with a world of wealth, privilege, and frivolous comfort. This encounter’s phantasmagorical yet ordinary absurdities turn his head.
However, what’s shown in “Crimson Gold” is hardly more important than what’s left out. The succession of events is plausible, practical, logical—yet the psychology of the Hussein character is left only lightly filled in. Hussein suffers from awful seizure-like spells, from combat injuries suffered at Shalamcheh, the site of a major battle in the Iran-Iraq War where Iranian troops were attacked with chemical weapons. He uses cortisone to treat his lingering maladies, and endures its debilitating physical and mental side effects. Yet the movie draws no clear line from his trauma and his pain—or from his poverty, his humiliations, or his frustrations—to the major crime that he commits. Rather, Panahi sets Hussein’s robbery side by side with disparate yet related events and aspects of his life, and fills the significant gaps between them with illuminating, diagnostic details regarding life in Iran over all.
This diffusion of individual psychology and segmenting of dramatic arcs into a panoramic fullness is “Crimson Gold” ’s most radical quality. If the film has a genre, it’s Panahi’s own, the one that he creates—critical street poetry. His view of Hussein’s daily life is as epiphanic as it is investigative, as wondrous as it is horrific. He delights in lovingly nuanced and humanistic visions of ordinary sublimity and agonizingly sees it crashing against official oppression, widespread cruelty, and general indifference. The absence of any clear cause of Hussein’s turn to violence suggests that yielding to destructive impulses is a natural response to his circumstances; the surprise isn’t why he would yield to a life of crime so much as why others might not. Here, one man’s breaking point comes off as a stifled cry of collective revolt. Panahi examines the society in which he lives and finds it to be criminal at its very core.
The politics of “Crimson Gold” didn’t escape the authorities. The film was banned in Iran, and Panahi was detained and interrogated because of it. Then, in 2010, having been a vocal supporter of the opposition to the regime, he was convicted of making anti-government propaganda. He was banned from filmmaking for twenty years, sentenced to six years of prison, and placed under house arrest. Nevertheless, he has managed to continue making films clandestinely, including “This Is Not a Film” and “Taxi,” in which he appears as himself and extends his fusion of documentary and fiction, of intimate drama and panoramic reckoning, to even more boldly personal extremes.
