The Seed of the Sacred Fig — an Arabian Nights warning
It’s impossible to watch the prize-winning Iranian film The Seed of the Sacred Fig without seeing the past four years of American life reflected in its story of a Tehran family under a daily totalitarian threat.
Public prosecutor Iman (Missagh Zareh), husband to the faithful Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) and father of two college-age girls, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), seeks to advance in the competitive legal system. Iman is a work-hours colleague of the bureaucrat Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and brings official intimidation home. Iman’s family life is strained because of social changes wrought in street protests by young women and Iranian youths. (A mob chants “Down with theocracy!” outside their apartment window.)
Attempting to follow Muslim customs, each family member is at cross-purposes. The national ideal that should unite them is fracturing. This would be banal — the stuff of sitcoms — if it weren’t absolutely terrifying. The banality of state terror infecting common lives is what makes The Seed of the Sacred Fig so recognizable.
It’s as if Iman and his household were trapped in a bad dream — patriarchal domination, female subjugation, an air of matter-of-fact religious oppression (despite little actual religious practice). The influence of Western media technology only stirs dissent, disbelief, and generalized paranoia.
Director Mohammad Rasoulof tracks social and moral collapse with the kind of unnerving calm and visual precision that made the Iranian New Wave so striking when Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees and Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence first stunned the film world in the 1990s. The bureaucratic sideshows of life-size patriotic cut-outs propped up at the doors in office corridors stand as humanoid warnings. Along with the uniform hijab headdress that women must raise or lower reflexively, it all evokes the punishing obedience rituals of the Covid lockdowns. (A Covid mask appears briefly during a car crash that mimics Hollywood excitation at the exact moment Iman’s paranoia spins out of his control.)
Somehow, Rasoulof has made a cautionary tale in the midst of oppression. The Seed of the Sacred Fig raises amazing doubts about the possibility of liberty occurring in modern Iran until, midway through, it becomes apparent that the vise-grip of totalitarianism also claims Rasoulof’s narrative. That grip turns into the mechanism of the film’s tension and its fascination.
Iman loses the gun issued for both duty and protection; as a result, his family members become suspects and are forced into interrogation. The consequences of their mandatory interview are official as well as personal, which is what’s terrifying. (During questioning, when Sadaf disappears beneath her hijab, she looks ancient — a figure of centuries-old subjugation.)
This fear increases as the family turns against itself, escaping Tehran for Iman’s hometown, stalking and hiding within a literal old-world maze. Rasoulof seems ambivalent about the generational conflict between these dark-eyed, handsome people. The impasse between Iman and his daughters develops from religious skepticism that rocks the family, eventually destroying trust, affection, and Iran itself.
This vision of Iranian nationalism gets intimate. Sadaf’s devotion to Iman is emotional, erotic, and traditional; then her spousal and maternal loyalties transform and become adversarial. Rasoulof shifts his tale into a cautionary proscription that is artful and mythic. Sadaf’s feminine fear of masculine force changes her from the woman who had chastised her daughters: “In faith there are no questions. You have to feel it in your bones.”
Sadaf spouts a tautology — faith as faith — that also holds for patriotism. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a half-skeptical lament for the process of tyranny and dissent, as alluded to in the scriptural epigraph about the strangling Ficus religiosa tree that gives the film its title. Watching this ironic Islamic tale is like seeing our ’60s youth revolution played back as a bizarre Arabian Nights fable. This is the most religious and political film on Barack Obama’s recent best-movies list; it romanticizes his stealth vision of “change.”