Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger donned a bulletproof vest and rifle to rescue his daughter in “Commando,” movies have been clamoring with men—each with their own Liam Neeson–esque “special set of skills”—whose paternal instinct has sent them on increasingly violent quests to protect young girls from the bad guys. The so-named Save the Girl subgenre’s problematic and inaccurate portrayals of immigrants and human trafficking aside (the controversy around last year’s “Sound of Freedom” is a case in point), these films are also usually guilty of stripping their female characters of agency.
But Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” flips this trope on its head. What starts out as a grounded domestic drama unexpectedly lurches into full-blown thriller territory when, in the film’s last section, the central father figure, Iman (Missagh Zareh), is exposed not to be a self-sacrificing defender of his two daughters but a spineless instrument of a misogynistic state. The film is set against a backdrop of protests following the real-life death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in custody in Iran—and Rasoulof’s knowing subversion of the father savior trope is cleverly deployed to show how even men with a moral compass can eventually bow down beneath the weight of a patriarchal regime.
The kernel for the high-octane final act in “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is planted early on when a gun winds up in the home of Iman. The conscientious father aspires to become a judge in the revolutionary court, and his promotion to state investigator is the next step towards achieving his ambition. But this rung of the ladder comes with its own set of problems. Not least is the fact that Iman is required to sign off on death penalty judgments indiscriminately without so much as a cursory glance at case evidence. Upon raising this with his superiors, he is told to either obey or get sacked. The burden of this moral dilemma takes its toll on him over the course of the film, slowly reddening his eyes and lending a grey pallidness to his skin. Ashamed, Iman spends more and more time in the office to avoid his family. As he succumbs to the will of his employer, he is forced to take the firearm home as essential protection against the threat of the justly angry.
Rather than making him familial protector though—as would a weapon in most male-led thrillers—the gun serves to catastrophically unravel the bond between Iman, his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and daughters. Fault lines begin to show at a family dinner where Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) pushes back against the biased reporting around the protests, and her father retorts by blaming her progressive beliefs on “foreign elements.” Despite his qualms with his job, Iman never once questions the integrity of the “God’s law” he sanctions, while the videos trickling through Rezvan and her sister Sana’s (Setareh Maleki) social media feeds enlighten them to a very different version of reality. The movie was predominantly shot inside (partly to evade the authorities. Iman believes the more he shields his daughters from the outside world, the safer they’ll be—but ironically, he is their greatest threat.
It’s when the gun goes missing that the tension climbs several notches to an almost unbearable level. After scouring the house and quizzing his family, the steadfast investigator’s suspicion falls on his daughters. In “Taken” or “You Were Never Really Here,” inquisition-style techniques would only be used on an unknown enemy, but Rasoulof’s horrific twist is that Iman wields such draconian interrogation methods to wrangle a confession from his own children. Failing to find the culprit and in a flurry of paranoia, Iman takes off with his family to what we believe will be a safehouse—his childhood home—out in the desert. But there, they are certainly not safe from their father’s coercion into admitting they stole the gun all to be captured by a camcorder, before he swiftly locks Rezvan and Najmeh up in two prison-like cells the house handily has built in.
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig” contains a concluding game of cat and mouse, which hammers home the insanity of the oppressive regime it depicts. Between the car chase which precedes the film’s final chapter and the forced taped confessions, the realism of the movie’s beginning is left behind in the dust. This surrealism crescendos as the women clamber over the ruins of a historic village, Kharanaq, while the father pursues them on foot—his intent unclear but very obviously malevolent. Iman at this moment represents the patriarchy in its most unalloyed form, as the trio of women symbolically wends their way through the wreckage of old Iran. Though Rasoulof deliberately leaves this father’s purpose ambiguous, what is undeniable is that he is by no means one of the male rescuers of yore, with a heart of gold and near-superhuman strength. And these women are more than capable of saving themselves.
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