Rosewater

Maziar Bahari is an Iranian journalist working for Newsweek. He goes to Tehran to cover the 2009 election. After the results are announced protests begin in the streets and he films the clashes. Shortly afterwards he is taken from his house and held in a cell for a hundred and eighteen days. He never sees his interrogator; he is blindfolded and knows the man only by the smell of the rosewater he wears. Jon Stewart writes and directs in his first film. Gael García Bernal plays Bahari. The source is Bahari's own book. The story of the production is part of the narrative. Before his arrest Bahari had appeared on Stewart's television programme, where a correspondent jokingly introduced himself as a spy; that recording was used as evidence during the interrogation. It is why Stewart made the film. The subject is the absurdity of the interrogation. The interrogator does not understand what Bahari does and the evidence he holds is meaningless; the pressure is not aimed at information but at getting a script confirmed. In the cell Bahari talks with his dead father and his sister, both of whom had been imprisoned by earlier regimes. That strand is the emotional centre. The limit is the director's inexperience; some scenes stay in a television idiom and the humour lowers the tension. Who it is for: viewers who like accounts of political imprisonment and films drawn from real events. Who it is not for: the narrative repeats, the pace is low, and Iranian politics is left on the surface.