When Mohammad Rasoulof’s Berlinale winner “But there is no evil” comes to the cinema, he draws attention once again to the fate of the filmmaker: Shortly after the award ceremony, he was sentenced to one year in prison.
Seldom has a Berlinale winner met with such undivided approval as in 2020 “There is no such thing as evil”. Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who was sentenced to prison and is not allowed to leave his Iranian homeland, later had to let his daughter Ranan tell him about it, who accepted the award for him.
His moral drama “There is no such thing as evil” ranked high above the competition. In its classical narrative art it defeated the traditionalists, in the advancement of its unusual episodic form the avant-garde. When this film hits theaters now, it will once again draw attention to the fate of this artist. Shortly after the award ceremony, he was sentenced to one year in prison and a two-year labor ban.
It was by no means the case that a political and moral message alone, especially brought forward by a persecuted person, would have enforced this price. The form is also subtly revolutionary: for two and a half hours, this film captivates three people who carry out death sentences or who refuse to commit crimes that preserve the system for a high price – but not through external drama, but an originally cinematic narrative culture. Through omissions, through a fine rhythm in which every moment counts and the power of imagination.
Divided into four self-contained narratives, the film resembles a cycle of short stories. Their common theme is the everyday death penalty in Iran. In no country that publishes figures is it enforced more often. Their everyday life, the seeming banality of their ritualized execution, tells the first story. The second already leads into a utopian space of possible refusal, but it seems quite possible: A military service who has been ordered to carry out a death sentence tries to evade this act by all means. But how far do you get with denial in a dictatorship? The prison in which this story takes place becomes a metaphor for a dictatorial system that can only be abandoned at risk of death.
Inner & outer emigration
The third story is a love story that takes a young soldier to the country house of his girlfriend’s family. What has led these intellectuals into their seemingly idyllic seclusion is obviously political persecution. But it doesn’t take long before the young man realizes that he himself was involved in the execution of a relative of his friend’s. Finally, the fourth episode continues the problems of the second and develops it into a panorama of internal and external emigration.
Episodic forms are not unusual in the cinema, especially in social dramas. But this is not a late sequel to Paul Thomas Anderson’s artificial style of “Magnolia,” which had an immense impact on filmmakers around the world after its 1999 release. Rasoulof has nothing in mind with the seductive possibilities of surprising punchlines and astonishing parallels that can be found in this form of film. There is no external aestheticism in his cinema, his poetry does not add anything, it searches for a purism of the essential. This is where he may have created his masterpiece. Possibly the division into four short films also enabled him to circumvent the censorship. In any case, the form cannot be separated from the reprisals to which he is exposed as a filmmaker. He turned them into art, what a triumph against the tormentors.
What emerges from this reduction is a celebration of the spirit of resistance that has almost been forgotten in western cinema. Anyone who believes the need to be courageous has been lost must bow down to it in shame. Now that this film is finally coming to the cinema, it reminds us of what precisely this medium can achieve for political education. As in the days of Pasolini, Godard and Alain Resnais, Rasoulof turns the cinema into a discursive space, a public and at the same time intimate place for common thinking and feeling.
At the Berlinale 2020 jury president Jeremy Irons called this work “equally tender and devastating” for its power. The whole room rose to the award ceremony for the film team present, which – as producer Farzad Pak said on behalf of the director who was held in Iran – risked their life for this film. People are used to dictatorships playing on film festivals like advertising shop windows, and they often find the doors open. In contrast to Asghar Farhadi’s Iranian Berlinale winning film from 2011, “Nader and Simin”, the Tehran regime could not adorn itself with a film that made the country look more liberal than it really is.
But there is no evil. Iran 2020. Director: Mohammad Rasoulof. 150 min.
