Half the cast of “Terrestrial Verses” never appears onscreen. Instead we hear their voices as they speak to a variety of ordinary Tehranians: a young woman applying for a job, a man seeking to register his newborn son’s name, a filmmaker, a little girl, a driver’s license applicant. Out in the audience, we’re watching the hopeful faces of those people, who become crestfallen as it becomes clear that whatever they want, no matter how small, is impossible, for no real reason at all. An authoritarian regime, and a bureaucratic establishment that props up byzantine rules, has seen to that.
“Terrestrial Verses,” written and directed by Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami, unfolds as a series of vignettes, almost like tiny one-act plays. Selena (Arghavan Shabani), the little girl, is wearing headphones and dancing when we meet her, while, off-camera, her mother and a shopkeeper discuss a uniform she needs for a school ceremony. Selena keeps getting called over by her mother, returning to our field of vision wearing yet another layer of clothing in the drab neutrals mandated by the school’s rules. In another vignette, a new father (Bahram Ark) wants to name his baby David, but is informed that it’s simply impossible, since the name is Western and doesn’t have the state-required religious connotation. In another, the filmmaker, named Ali (Farzin Mohades), exasperatedly converses with a culture ministry official, who wants him to remove nearly everything from his screenplay in order to make it acceptable to the regime.
The most maddening segments show how boxed-in women are, attempting to simply live their lives without accidentally crossing some line. Or not even crossing it: Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari), a young ride-share driver with and a punk affect and short hair beneath her head scarf, argues with an official. Traffic cameras caught what the official insists is a woman driving Sadaf’s car, head scarf removed. Isn’t a car a private space?, Sadaf asks. The official disagrees, and Sadaf is deemed a criminal.
Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, “Terrestrial Verses” operates with a cumulative effect. It’s death by a thousand pinpricks, a succession of small indignities. Each seemingly simple task is not just saddled with procedural irritations — forms to fill out, appointments to attend, banal questions to answer — but with fear. Suppose your answer to a routine query could incriminate you or there’s no way to prove to an official that you aren’t lying. How would you live your life?
Those questions run through “Terrestrial Verses,” which consists entirely of stark, locked-off shots that place each segment’s protagonist in the box of the frame. It becomes clear that the shots themselves are full of meaning. Each actor in the uniformly excellent cast is centered on the screen, and as they are heaped with indignities, the frame becomes something like a mug shot, or a prison — a place where they’re confined for us to look at them, watch their reactions, judge their facial cues.
In fact, the constant anxiety of being observed is what the film is driving at. An authoritarian government operates not just by threatening its citizens with surveillance, but with turning them against one another, ready to catch someone in an infraction. The panopticon effect keeps people in line, sure. But it also guts the very foundation of a society, making everyone suspicious. Paranoia is not a solid base on which to build a citizenry. Instead, it divides people. And that, of course, is the point.
All of this could be accomplished in a preachy or ham-handed manner, but what’s best about “Terrestrial Verses” is its discipline, the way it draws the viewer into the story as more than just an observer. We slowly become part of the tale as we deduce what’s going on here. In fact, we’re the ones sitting in the bureaucrat’s seat.
And that raises the question: how did the bureaucrats become this way? What would cause a person to insist on inanities, bluff and lie their way through an interaction with a fellow citizen just to reinforce silly rules? The answer is simple: They’re being watched too. But the answer is also more complex, and familiar to anyone who’s found themselves in this situation. When you don’t have much power, then the temptation to lord it over those who have even less is a strong one.
Asgari and Khatami seem to know this well, and manage to make “Terrestrial Verses” into something approaching a thriller. Each time a new vignette begins, there’s a new story to absorb, and there’s no way to tell what strange turn this conversation will take. I found myself inching toward the front of my seat, fascinated and horrified, holding these characters’ experiences up against my own and finding, at times, more similarities than I might care to admit.
“Terrestrial Verses” finishes at a crisp 77 minutes, barely long enough to really qualify as a feature film, but by the end it’s quite overwhelming. The opening and closing sequences, which deviate a bit from the vignettes, suggest that Tehran, and many other places like it, are filled with such stories. These sequences also suggest some kind of change is afoot. Each small humiliation, taken alone, will raise your blood pressure a little. But put them all together, and more seismic reverberations may finally rattle a society to its core.
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