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MovieMail's Review
With thunderous brow and elongated face Rafi Pitts defines ‘brooding’ in this Iranian thriller. David Perilli stalks a menacing film asking hard questions about contemporary Iran.
With thunderous brow and elongated face Rafi Pitts defines ‘brooding’ in Iranian drama The Hunter. In one of those happy accidents of filmmaking after the original lead turned up late on his first day director Pitts sacked him and took the main role himself. The tragedy of the film’s main character, and perhaps the fault-lines of modern Iran itself, can be mapped out upon ex-pat Pitts’ face.
Pitts’ character Ali certainly has much to be upset about. Laconically told with little in the way of exposition or dialogue we gradually gleam that he’s recently been released from jail. The only job he can score is as a night watchman at a factory in Tehran, massively culling the amount of time he can spend with his wife and daughter. His only release comes from going hunting alone in the misty forests outside of town.
Then one day his family disappear. Long hours at the police station gradually reveal half-truths through stilted layers of bureaucracy. Eventually Ali is identifying his wife in the morgue. She’s been the victim of a shootout with undisclosed ‘rebels’ and his daughter is missing. Almost understandably Ali flips, uses his rifle and drives off on the run.
Zooming out from Pitt’s face the wider images in The Hunter scream out in pent-up oppression. Cinematographer Mohammad Davudi, who also worked with Pitts on his previous film It’s Winter, composes evocative contrasts between the city and the countryside. Often we see Ali walk across bold vistas of heavy industry – thousands of untouchable brand new cars outside the factory for instance or Ali’s flat lost amongst many others in a block.
A rubber-burning car chase signals a change in gear in The Hunter from Iranian arthouse to thriller territory more in keeping with The American or even Falling Down. But what follows remains true to Pitts’ view of society, sharing something with the Romanian New Wave’s distrust and questioning of arbitrary authority as seen in Police, Adjective.
Pitt opens The Hunter with a menacing photograph of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards mounted on motorbikes back in 1980. His question in The Hunter is, 'where has this violent energy gone today?'.
A brooding thriller, The Hunter stars writer/director Rafi Pitts as Ali, a man whose world is shattered when his wife and young daughter go missing. In the face of police indifference to his plight, something snaps inside him and he shoots an officer dead with his hunting rifle and goes on the run. An indictment of political corruption, ‘The Hunter’ is a tense and compelling film set against the background of social unrest in Iran.
