Gholam (2017) • Movie Review
Shahab Hosseini delivers a nuanced performance
(Source: The Guardian)

Haunted by his past and with a future sliding towards inertia, Gholam finds himself involved in the conflict of a total stranger.

'Gholam' is the debut feature from award-winning Iranian artist and filmmaker Mitra Tabrizian, in collaboration with Cyrus Massoudi.

Shahab Hosseini plays Gholam, a taciturn immigrant who works as a minicab driver by night and mechanic by day in a garage owned by kindly Mr Sharif (eminent Iranian actor Behrouz Behnejad).

At the cafe run by his uncle, Gholam runs into a former colleague from his army days years ago, who wants to entice him into some shady business, maybe to do with politics. (The story takes place in 2011, during the height of the Arab spring.)



Cast: Shahab Hosseini, Nasser Memarzia, Behrouz Behnejad, Corinne Skinner-Carter

Gholam review
Shahab Hosseini delivers a nuanced performance

Shahab Hosseini, who deservedly won recognition for his intense performance in Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman, offers a nuanced study in acting minimalism with this melancholy portrait of a man living in exile in London, never quite beyond the reach of his own troubled past. It’s a feature debut for Iranian artist-turned-writer-director Mitra Tabrizian, whose background in still photography perhaps explains the crepuscular cinematography.

Tabrizian’s world building is less convincing when it comes to the non-Iranian characters in the story, such as a gang of skinhead thugs and a saintly old African-Caribbean woman Gholam hopes to help. But less assured touches are balanced out by a keen eye for the lonely anonymity of London’s streets, back alleys and strip-lit convenience stores. (Source: The Guardian)

***

Review by TheMovieWaffler.com ★★★

Movies depicting the struggles of migrants from the Middle East into Western Europe will remain important to film culture as long as the continent continues to struggle with the moral ramifications of this phenomenon. It is even more important that directors who straddle both cultures, like Fatih Akin for example, get to tell these kinds of stories. This is certainly the case for Mitra Tabrizian, whose new film, Gholam, details the struggles of a despondent and broke Iranian living in London.



Tabrizian’s film opens with a shot of the titular character (Asghar Farhadi regular Shahab Hosseini, as effectively brooding as ever) glowering into the rearview mirror of the London cab he drives, irritated with the callous businessman in the backseat. When he’s not shuttling Londoners around the city, Gholam is either working his second job at a garage with an intellectual fellow expat (Amerjit Deu), or he’s hanging around his uncle’s restaurant (his Aunt never wants him to pay, but he almost always insists), or he’s talking with his worried mother on the phone in his small, bare apartment. Gholam seems to be simply passing the days, troubled by a past in Iran that is about to return to haunt him.

While Gholam has the potential to be a great story, that potential unfortunately goes somewhat untapped. There appear to be two major ideas at work in Gholam. First, there is the story of the challenges and tedium the character must face as an immigrant in London. Second, there is the more plot-driven narrative of mysterious characters from Gholam’s military past surfacing in London.

The film is quite effective at exploring the former idea, but falls short with the latter. The second narrative begins to develop late in the film and never appears to grow or deepen. What’s more, it never seems to effectively cohere with what seems to be the film’s main preoccupation (the immigrant experience) into a dramatically sound whole. A potential link could have been the interesting character of Arash (Armin Karima), Gholam’s young cousin who seems relatively well-assimilated in English culture while maintaining a deep, powerful connection with his Iranian heritage. Yet his fascination with Gholam’s past could have been developed further as well.

A third sort of half-narrative emerges in the film at some point: Gholam’s friendship with an older lady and her younger relative. But this story feels inorganic and saccharine in the larger context of the more serious issues the film wishes to explore. With all of these narrative issues at play, Gholam’s content, while grasping at interesting ideas, ultimately feels flat and confused.