The international film community was shocked when news broke last weekend that Iranian filmmaker Dariush Mehrjui and his wife, screenwriter and costume designer Vahideh Mohammadifar, had been stabbed to death and found in their home outside Tehran. Mehrjui is considered the founder of the Iranian new wave of the 1970s. With classics like The Cycle (1977) and The Tenants (1986) he delivered sharp social portraits and with the title character of Hamoun (1990), he created one of the most beloved Iranian film characters. Dariush Mehrjui was not only important within Iran and for the Iranian diaspora, but influenced filmmakers worldwide. Oscar-winning contemporary director Asghar Farhadi incorporated into his film The Salesman (2016) a tribute to what is probably Mehrjui’s most famous and influential film: TheCow from 1969.
Symbolic
TheCow was already shown at the Rotterdam film festival in 1972 thanks to IFFR founder Huub Bals, which Mehrjui and the generations that followed him have always continued to program faithfully – which is why we in the Netherlands have received such a richly varied picture of Iranian cinema. TheCow is a symbolic and expressionistic story about a man who, after the death of his cow, wants nothing more than to take its place. Mehrjui made the film when he had just returned to Iran, after going to the United States in 1959 to study film in California. The French filmmaker Jean Renoir (known for, among others La grande illusion (1937) and Les rules du jeu (1939), considered by critics to be two of the best films ever made) was one of his teachers there.
Thanks to Renoir, Mehrjui became acquainted with two of the most important film movements of the twentieth century: post-war Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague of the 1950s and 1960s. And with the European author filmmakers Bergman and Fellini, whose dynamic mise-en-scene became a major influence on the signature of Mehrjui’s films: colorful and expressive, with often extreme close-ups and jump cut montages.
Excessive modernization
Dariush Mehrjui was born on December 8, 1939 into an upper-middle-class family in Tehran. During his studies in the United States, he emerged as a passionate promoter of Persian culture, including by publishing the literary magazine Pars Review.
Perhaps that is why he looked so critically at the developments his country was going through. A common thread in his work is a sharp look at what he considered excessive urban modernization, but he was not conservative. Just as often he addressed archaic structures and the disadvantaged position of women in rural areas. It brought him into conflict with virtually every censor of successive regimes. TheCow Although it was financially supported by the Shah’s regime, it was also immediately banned.
Even in post-revolutionary Iran, it was not always easy for Mehrjui to get his films off the ground, which is why he emigrated to France in 1981.
Ironically, Ayatollah Khomeini TheCow on television and was so charmed that Mehrjui was able to return in 1985.
He made it again in his home country The Tenants, a social comedy about a dilapidated apartment building that houses people from all social classes and backgrounds. That film was criticized by filmmakers with a religious background.
Nevertheless, the film was a big hit with audiences. His next box office success was Hamouna philosophical comedy starring a tragicomic intellectual so characteristic of his films.
Censor
He once said in an interview that the censor was always watching in the background. With every new film, Mehrjui first asked himself: how far can I go? And then: is it worth telling this story within the given limitations? In the 1990s he made a series of portraits of women that were banned one by one, but he kept trying.
According to him, the fact that he was ultimately able to make artistically high-quality films that were loved by the public within that restrictive film culture was because his films had a philosophical heart. They looked at individuals, not systems, and always had an eye for human nature.
At the time of his death, there were no known political controversies surrounding Merhjui, unlike other filmmakers in Iran who have been imprisoned, banned from filming or placed under house arrest. Mehrjui and Mohammadifar leave behind three children.