Farhadi’s film questions what makes ‘A Hero’

Above : Jamir Adidi stars in Asghar Farhadi’s film “A Hero.” (Photo/Amazon Prime)

Movie review : “A Hero,” written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, starring Jamir Adidi, Sahar Goldust, Mohsen Tanabandeh. Streaming on Amazon Prime.

When we first meet the character of Rahim, the protagonist played by Jamir Adidi in Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi ’s new film “A Hero,” he comes across as a curious combination of good humor and graciousness. This seems strange because he is just being released from prison on a two-day leave.

Even a two-day escape from confinement would be something to savor, of course, but there is more to Rahim’s upbeat attitude than mere appreciation. We soon learn that he’s hatched a scheme to make his release permanent. Yet as written and directed by Farhadi, “A Hero” ends up being far more than simply one man’s quest for freedom. Farhadi takes us on a path that weaves its way through a thicket of human and social conflict involving mixed motives and shifty morals.

Anyone familiar with Farhadi won’t be surprised by this. He’s a two-time Oscar winner, his 2011 film “A Separation” and his 2016 film “The Salesman” both having garnered awards as Best Foreign Language features. The first follows a couple engaged in a messy divorce, while the second involves a man seeking to avenge his wife’s assault. As the critic Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Farhadi makes dramas of domestic discord that refuse to heighten anything they show you; they are steadfastly observant, unvarnished, specific and real.”

This description applies also to Farhadi’s 2018 Spanish-language film “Todos lo saben” (“Everybody Knows” in English), which stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. But it applies particularly to “A Hero.”

Upon leaving jail, Rahim visits his brother-in-law, his sister Mali’s husband, who is part of a crew working on an immense rise of scaffolding attached to Naqsh-e Rostam , the ancient necropolis where four Persian kings – including Darius the Great – were buried. What the significance of this site is to Farhadi’s movie is anyone’s guess, though the effort that Rahim makes to climb up just to head back down does say something about his tenacity.

And it’s that very tenacity, along with what we begin to suspect is an inflated sense of himself, that propels Rahim from one scheme to the next. It is, after all, a business plan gone wrong that got him in debt in the first place. His partner, he says, absconded with the funds he had borrowed, which may or may not be true but doesn’t surprise anyone who knows him – certainly not Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), the brother of Rahim’s former wife and to whom Rahim is in debt.

Only Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), the woman Rahim hopes to marry, trusts him – and agrees to help. Part of that trust involves a mysterious bag of coins that, at first, Rahim believes he’ll be able to sell to settle enough of his debt to get out of prison for good. When that plan falls through he then decides to find the bag’s owner and return it.

Farhadi never makes clear whether this is because Rahim wants to do what’s right, or take advantage of the seeming act of goodwill to ingratiate himself both with the prison directors and the board of a local charity. Maybe he’s even doing both at once. Whatever his motives, though, his act is something that officials at both the prison and the charity see as a way of attracting good publicity for their respective organizations.

And so Rahim becomes a celebrity, the symbol of everything that’s good in humanity – a role that he willingly embraces, even as some question both his story and his inherent integrity, including a fellow inmate, a man in a position to offer him a job and, most of all his creditor, Bahram.

We see all this play out in a way that, typical of Farhadi, avoids providing easy answers. If Rahim is a devious scoundrel, or at the very least a hapless ne’er-do-well, his young son – a sympathetic character with a speech impediment – continues to love and support him. As does, despite misgivings, his sister, not to mention Farkhondeh, who has no misgivings at all – Rahim being maybe her final chance to get married and leave her own trying family circumstances.

So we wonder: Where did the bag of coins come from? What caused the breakup of Rahim’s first marriage? Why is everyone so concerned with their respective reputations? Farhadi keeps us guessing. As for whether Rahim is a hero, a more pertinent question might be this: In Farhadi’s world, is anyone?