Review: Rosewater

Rosewater (15)

USA 2014  103 mins  Dir: Jon Stewart  Starring: Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Dimitri Leonidas, Claire Foy

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame makes his debut as writer/director with the compelling true story of Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari. Given Stewart’s background and the absurdity of the circumstances in which Bahari came to be imprisoned, you might expect this to be a black comedy. Certainly, the early scenes offer plenty of opportunity for fun at the expense of the enforcers of a totalitarian theocracy struggling with the concept of satire. But Stewart also succeeds in keeping a grip on the story as it turns darker and more claustrophobic when Bahari is subjected to psychological torture and even a mock execution.

The opening scene has Bahari (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Motorcycle Diaries fame) being forcibly removed from his mother’s home in Tehran by agents who take a particular interest in his Sopranos and Pasolini DVDs (“Porno?”) and Leonard Cohen albums (“Jewish?”). In flashback, we learn that he’s an Iranian-born journalist who lives in London with his pregnant wife (Foy) and has returned to his homeland to cover the momentous 2009 presidential election for Newsweek. As it becomes clear that the election was rigged in favour of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against reformist opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Bahari takes to the streets to cover the rise of the Green Movement and its brutal suppression. Fatefully, he also gives a satirical interview to Stewart’s Daily Show sidekick Jason Jones, who poses as an American spy. It’s this that leads to his 118 day detention and interrogation by the ‘specialist’ he nicknames Rosewater (Bodnia).

Under intense pressure to deliver an espionage confession without physically harming Bahari, so he can be paraded triumphantly on TV, Rosewater is in no mood to listen to logic (“Why would a real spy have a TV show?”). All he wants to hear is that the journalist is, in fact, a secret agent acting on orders from the Jews of America – aka the Great Satan – who are conspiring to destroy Iran’s holy system. His brutal yet effective method is to crush all hope.

Stewart directs confidently in verite style, seamlessly incorporating newsreel footage, making excellent use of Jordan to double as Iran (the versatile Kingdom also stood in for Iraq in The Hurt Locker, fact fans), and deftly handling potentially cheesy sequences in which Bahari communes with the ghosts of his dead father (imprisoned under the Shah) and sister (locked up for being a communist). The obvious comparisons with Argo will do the film no harm commercially, though this is less of a thriller than, ultimately, a chamber piece in which the equally impressive Bernal and Bodnia get to bounce off one another: a wily, worldly, frequently terrified westernised expat jousting with a jealous, pervy and often chillingly sadistic minor bureaucrat who fears for his own job and struggles to marshal ‘incriminating’ evidence beyond his comprehension (“Who is Anton Chekhov?” he demands accusingly at one point). It’s not the greatest interrogation movie ever made, and the fact that we know the outcome robs it of tension, but this is still a fascinating story, skilfully told.