Iranian writer-director Houman Seyedi’s sardonic 2022 allegorical
satire World War III announces its subversiveness before a frame of film
is even unspooled. Darkly foreboding
purely by title and a film that can be read many ways in relation to the title’s
meaning, in print it sounds like a Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb. In theory
that’s true but in practice World War III is a movie-within-a-movie
making-of black comedy that is snarky with tongue firmly planted in cheek touching
on The Producers or To Be or Not to Be lampooning of the Nazies. Also a class study of laymen vs. industry men
with more than a few overlapping lines between fantasy and reality blurred
inextricably together, it is wholly uncategorizable. Compared to the Academy Award winning South
Korean film Parasite for its visually enthralling dose of cold hard
irony, World War III really isn’t like anything you’ve seen before or
think you know.
Shakib (a powerhouse Mohsen Tanabandeh) is a labor worker who
has picked up relations with a deaf-mute prostitute named Ladan (Mahsa Hejazi)
when he accepts a job of guarding the set of a film being made about the
Holocaust. Lending a hand where he can
for meager wages, Shakib carries equipment and props around the Iranian location
doubling for a concentration camp replete with wires and tall pillars which
look more like science-fiction than Auschwitz.
Also participating as an extra, going through the motions of being stripped
naked and run through showers and gas chambers, Shakib’s ambitions are
small.
However, when the actor play Adolf
Hitler falls ill and collapses on set, the director cherry picks Shakib as his
new Hitler, pushing the inexperienced actor into the forefront in costume and
make up in the role of the Fuhrer.
Meanwhile Ladan shacks up with Shakib who is tasked with guarding and
residing in the Hitler house set, taking refuge from brutal pimps on the hunt
for her. As the lines between fantasy
and reality become increasingly blurred in meta narrative context, Ladan
mysteriously vanishes, sending Shakib into a mad frenzy that threatens to
derail the whole production and/or spill over into violence.
Much of the film’s gloomy yet painterly vistas captured in scope 2.1:1 widescreen
by Sound and Fury cinematographer Payman Shadmanfar, frequently handheld
without becoming too shaky. The
soundscape and score by Bamdad Afshar is soft and understated at first before
gradually blooming into full blown requiem.
The film of course draws a majority of its seismic power from actor
Mohsen Tanabandeh who creates a tormented, internally conflicted figure who
finds himself being pushed further and further to the brink of madness. Also lending an intense performance is Navid
Nosrati as the beleaguered Saeed who will look the other way to see his film
through even if it means overlooking the possible loss of human life.
--Andrew Kotwicki