• Rating:
• Director: Mohammad Shirvani
• Main Cast: Mana Rabiee, Ali Hooshmand, Khosro Hassanzadeh, Reza Hassanzadeh, Aboozar Javanmard
• Release Year: 2004
• Country: IR
• Run Time: 83 minutes

Plot

With Navel, filmmaker Mohammad Shirvani has made what is being called the first experimental feature to come out of Iran since the revolution. Shirvani selected a cast of nonprofessional actors (all of whom play characters close to their own lives), laid the story points for them, gave them a camcorder, and allowed his cast to improvise all of their own dialogue. Navel takes place in Tehran, mostly in an apartment the five characters share, and on the streets, where they drive through the night together, seemingly with no purpose. Chista (Mana Rabiee) is a young woman who has just come back to Iran from New York. Her English is better than her Farsi, and she's recently broken up with her boyfriend. Reza (Reza Hassanzadeh) is a former cleric who still seems to hold strong religious beliefs. Khosro (Khosro Hassanzadeh) is a handsome, divorced younger man who competes with the oldest of the group, the cynical, hard-bitten Mani (Ali Hooshmand) for Chista's attention. Aboozar (Aboozar Javanmard), Mani's nephew, a soldier on leave, disgraces his uncle when he surreptitiously videotapes a neighbor by her pool. The group discusses love, sex, and religion late into the night, smoking on the apartment's terrace. They drive the streets, taking turns holding the camera. Characters disappear from the group as the film goes on, and the emotional content of their monologues grows more profound. A private showing of Navel in Iran was shut down by the authorities. The film had its U.S. premiere at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Review

Perhaps it would be easy to dismiss Mohammad Shirvani's Navel as so much navel-gazing if its loose-limbed narrative and digressive discourse didn't expose us to an element of Iranian culture that has not yet been explored in cinema. While it's fascinating in its cultural specificity, Shirvani's bare-bones video production also exposes middle-class Iranian adults who sit around talking and smoking (and talking about smoking), and competing for the attention of the pretty woman in the room, just like a similar group in any other country in the world might. The lack of narrative focus, the seemingly pointless driving, the use of night vision, the "birth" sequences that begin and end the movie, and the self-recording (as characters record each other and, occasionally, themselves) give the film an almost dreamlike, after-hours feeling. But sharp details stand out -- a cigarette lit with the lens of one character's glasses; Reza (Reza Hassanzadeh), the former cleric's brief, touching encounter with an unidentified woman; Chista (Mana Rabiee), dressed in white, floating through a crowd of women in black chadors; and later, her private videotaped confession to an unappreciative ex-boyfriend. Chista, being a Westernized Iranian woman, offers the viewer a strong point of identification. The meandering talk, the jokes, and the digressions add up to more than the sum of their parts, producing a surprisingly powerful sense of melancholy. There's a pervasive feeling that the characters stand outside their own culture, and that the connections between them -- whatever fleeting joy they might produce -- are ephemeral. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide

Cast

• Mana Rabiee - Chista
• Ali Hooshmand - Mani
• Khosro Hassanzadeh - Khosrow
• Reza Hassanzadeh - Reza
• Aboozar Javanmard - Aboozar

Credit

Hoshang Khobbakht - Producer; Mohammad Shirvani - Director; Mohammad Shirvani - Editor; Mohammad Shirvani - Cinematographer; Mohammad Shirvani - Producer; Mohammad Shirvani - Screenwriter