(4/5)

I find myself endlessly fascinated by underground Iranian film and literature that promise to show what life in Iran (often specifically Tehran) is like without the usually omnipresent government filter. I quite enjoyed No One Knows About Persian Cats (review), another film in this vein, but I thought it wasn’t as strong or cohesive as it could’ve been. Dog Sweat basically has all the things I liked about Persian Cats, and none of the weaknesses.

Dog Sweat follows several interconnected young people trying to navigate the universal perils of youth and relationships with the added pressure that comes with being young in Tehran. Mahsa wants to be a singer, but it’s forbidden for women to be solo singers, so she’s recording secretly with a couple of friends (who may or may not be trustworthy). Two men who are best friends and perhaps more are being pushed by their families into meeting women, even though they find fulfillment in each other. Relatively outspoken feminist Katie winds up having an affair with her cousin’s husband, while her brother Dawood enters a shy romance with her friend Katherine. Finally, a man dealing with the grief of his mother’s death in an auto accident attacks a group of fundamentalists.

As these stories play out and intertwine, writer/director Hossein Keshavarz and co-writer Maryam Azadi prove to have a very nuanced understanding of both their subjects and how to portray them both sympathetically and realistically. The actors also show a great deal of subtlety in their performances, showing both the inner turmoil they feel in the situations in which they find themselves and also the joy some of them are able to pull out of those situations. There’s a lot of humor in the script, especially for the very cute couple of Dawood and Katherine, who spend most of the film just trying to find a private place where they can be together. Other characters, like Katie, carry far more sadness and self-loathing, which is just as subtly depicted. The filmmakers are also very clever at getting across scandalous (for Iran) subject matter without being explicit about it – the clues are there for the homosexual couple, for example, but it’s never overt; there’s also a simultaneously funny and horrifying gag about a condom that never explicitly shows or tells that’s what it’s about.

One could wonder why all this dancing around content since this is an underground film and could presumably do whatever it wants, since it’s not, like, government-sanctioned anyway. Personally, I think working with restrictions like this, especially these days with American and European film is so permissive, is a little bit refreshing, but I also suspect that it’s part of a system of safeguards that Keshavarz put in place to protect the actors and try to keep them from being blacklisted from parts in mainstream Iranian film.

With films like this it’s sometimes difficult to separate the film itself from the fascinating stories about the production itself. For example, Keshavarz and Azadi applied for some fifteen or twenty separate filmmaking permits for short films (which Azadi completely wrote, because the script has to be submitted in order to get a permit to shoot) in order to shoot around the city of Tehran, and then they just shot this film instead of the shorts for which they had the permit. That’s how they were able to get a lot of the outdoor scenes shot in public places (by contrast, No One Know About Persian Cats was shot without permits at all, so almost all of its scenes are indoors). Also, the ending of the film was supposed to be different, but the actress needed for the final scene couldn’t be there because her father found out about the film and what it was really about and refused to allow her to finish it. Yet as interesting as the production was, it shouldn’t overshadow the finished product, which is excellent even if the context of its production isn’t known.

There are a lot of really great scenes in here, most of them quiet and understated, but saying more than is actually stated, and the filmmakers keep a great balance among the characters, with the exception of the political activist guy whose mother is in the hospital – that one seems far less connected to the others, less subtle, and less moving, but I guess having a more politicized character in the mix is probably valuable. But I personally didn’t like that segment enough to drop it down a half-star for me; it would be 4 1/2 stars if that story had been stronger. The other stories are all great and show the difficulty of following career dreams, maintaining the relationships you want to, and staying true to your ideological ideals in the face of pervasive and oppressive governmental and societal norms. It’s useful to remember, too, as you look at these young people and how they behave around each other and at home, that up until the revolution in the late ’70s, Iran was one of the most progressive Middle Eastern countries. That sense of buried freedoms still burns close to the surface, and it’s wonderful to see it blossom up with such tenderness and beauty and even joy in films like Dog Sweat. (The title, incidentally, is a slang term for a black market liquor popular in Iran. At least, that’s what I gathered from some off-handed comments made during the Q&A. File under “things I should’ve asked the director when I talked to him after.”)

I do not know if this film has distribution yet or not; the LA Film Festival was its world premiere, and there is very little information available on the internet about it outside of the LA Film Fest itself. Look for it at a festival near you and check it out if you’re interested in the state of Iran, or even if you just like well-made character pieces, because it is also that.

Directed by Hossein Keshavarz
Screenplay: Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Azadi
Cinematography: Ehsan Karimi
Cast: Ahmad Akbarzadeh, Tahereh Esfahani, Bagher Forohar, Shahrokh Taslimi, Rahim Zamani
IMDb
LA Film Fest Guide