As I gave my ticket to the young woman at the entrance to the
cinema showing the beautifully but also sickeningly photographed
Stoning of Soraya M., she said to me with an official
cheerfulness: “Enjoy the film!” Even if she had not seen the film
herself, she could hardly have failed to notice that it was named
for an atrocity, or to have heard that the audience was required
to watch that atrocity in all its ghastly and bloody detail. Yet
without quite realizing it, I think, she had put her finger on
the problem with the movie. Structurally, that is, movies
are entertainment. They are meant to be enjoyed, however
disturbing their subject matter. There’s no shame in that. The
same is true of all art. A week or two before this, I had been to
see King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington
and, though I didn’t much enjoy it, I never would have thought it
an impertinence on the producers’ part to try to make me enjoy
it. That’s the point of going to the theatre, as it is the
movies.
King Lear, for those whose memories of their Shakespeare
are hazy, includes several murders, the hanging, off-stage, of a
young woman, and scenes on stage in which one elderly man is
driven mad while another’s eyes are gouged out. It would perhaps
be too much to say that these are enjoyable moments, but they are
part of an experience that very often is enjoyable
because it allows us to observe human evil or folly from enough
of a distance that our reaction to it is one of contemplation and
reflection rather than fear and disgust — or at least the sort
of fear and disgust we would expect to feel in the presence of
the real thing, rather than a simulacrum. This performance of
Lear, however, tried to close that gap by stressing the
horror of the civil war that, to Shakespeare, was only a part —
and that not a major part — of what the play was about. People
in contemporary camouflage gear were shown tossing shrouded
corpses into a mass grave for a quarter of an hour. It seems that
people get killed in wars. Who knew?
This trick of using vivid visual representations of blood and
death is one that contemporary theatrical directors have learned
from the movies. At least since Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
people have come to expect to be entertained by “daring” attempts
to eliminate that distance between reality and representation. We
want our movies to “look real.” And because of the hyper-realism
of cinematic images, the movies are much better at looking real
than any other art. As a result, the culture as a whole seems to
have accepted the dubious premise that the more graphic its
imagery of physical horror the more authentic a movie is. Being
true to death is now more highly valued than being true to life,
and it can become a fatal temptation to a movie-maker to try to
make our flesh creep by making us look at that which no normal
person would ever wish to see.
This is what I think has happened to director Cyrus Nowrasteh and
the other film-makers involved with The Stoning of Soraya
M. I also think I can anticipate what they would say to
those who object to having their noses rubbed in the sickening
event described in the title of this film. He would tell them
that it is good for them to see it. In order to be properly
outraged by the deeds which are performed under the aegis of the
wicked fanatics who have ruled Iran for the last 30 years, we
have to see those deeds in all their horror. It’s sort of like
having to see a movie before you criticize it, I guess. That I
feel the force of that convention is the main reason why
I, at least, went to see The Stoning of Soraya M.,
though I very much wanted not to go. But I couldn’t help thinking
that it is rather an insult to the audience’s imagination to say
that it has got to see an actual stoning before it can properly
abominate the act of stoning someone. I don’t know if I would go
so far as to describe the result as “torture-porn,” as the
New
York Times did, but the movie’s unnecessarily graphic
imagery does lend some color to the reviewer’s otherwise
ridiculous charge that the evil husband (Navid Negahban) is
too evil and resembles an anti-Semitic caricature under
the Nazis.
In other words, it’s hard not to see the film as propaganda
rather than art. It’s a pity because what there is of artistry
apart from the central episode is very promising. Mozhan Marn as
Soraya turns in a fantastic performance, as does the rest of the
cast, and the look of the dusty, isolated Iranian mountain
village, Kupayeh, where the real-life event on which the film is
based took place is, to my eye anyway, utterly convincing. That
religion is only the pretext for much more discreditable motives
in bringing about the stoning also rings true to me. I especially
liked the bit at the end where the narrator, Zahra (Shohreh
Aghdashloo), who is the brave aunt of the victim, points out to
the appalled mullah (Ali Pourtash), furious with her for causing
Soraya’s story to be transmitted to the outside world, that if he
really believed in the religion he professed and its law that he
claimed to uphold he would be glad for the world to know about
what had been done in Kupayeh, rather than ashamed. Without the
actual stoning, The Stoning of Soraya M. would be a
movie well worth seeing.
