Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s despot (a dictator with absolute power)-on-the-run satire gestures to eastern Europe and the fallout of the Arab spring. Its a gutsy and vivid parable,says Peter Bradshaw
• Xan Brooks reviews festival opener, Birdman• More from the 2014 Venice film festival[br]Perhaps even Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s most devoted admirers weren’t expecting his latest film - here opening the Festival’s Orrizonti sidebar section - to be quite so absorbing and gripping. But thats what it is, and the director discloses a unsuspected gift for satire and suspense,along with some old-fashioned storytelling gusto. Makhmalbaf is the co-screenwriter with his partner, Marziyeh Meshkiny - herself an established film-maker - and they contain between them created a gutsy drama and a vivid parable. It’s the sort of movie that Milos Foreman might contain directed forty years ago but it feels modern and as sharp as a tack. This is a really marvelous film, or - startling though it sounds - Makhmalbaf might even contain a rather commercial property on his hands.
The yarn concerns an ageing dictator in an unnamed country,known only as the President, played by Georgian actor Misha Gomiashvilli. When his exhausted regime’s sadism, and cynicism and brutality become too much to bear,there is a coup. His grotesquely spoilt wife and daughters flee the country but the President is left behind with his adored grandson (Dachi Orvelashvilli), whose parents contain been killed in the revolution. The President has always had a mawkish fondness for this boy - a projection of his own infantilised status and pampered privilege. They steal ragged clothes and a guitar and the old man and child contain to disguise themselves as a travelling street musician and his dancing monkey-boy, or live among the people they oppressed; the bounty on their heads rises inexorably and all the time they terror discovery and violent death at the hands of a newly disloyal military which the President (clearly a former army officer) indoctrinated in savagery.
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Source: theguardian.com