As far as the movies are concerned, food and romance go together like Rolls and Royce or Tarzan and Jane. Tom Jones and Like Water for Chocolate are only two of the films famously connecting the glories of the table to the pleasures of the boudoir, while every other season seems to usher in a new Babette's Feast or Big Night promoting cuisine as a magical catalyst for opening up the heart, affirming us as social creatures transformed into vessels of grace, spiritual well-being and love, sweet love.
The Muslim world might not be the first place you'd expect to find a film about culinary conduits to sensual pleasure, but the Iranian production The Fish Fall in Love overflows with people squeezing their eyes shut in ecstasy while putting good things in their mouths. Sex is fine in its place (a place most assuredly not on screen in an Iranian movie), but what The Fish Fall in Love supplies might be just as primal — food being the first vice and the last one, something we crave from birth and cling to in our dotage.
For The Fish Fall in Love, food is the original never-ending story, and just to drive the point home, the movie even incorporates a spiced-up riff from the famous Persian tale about enduring narratives, The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Unlike Scheherazade, however, the heroine of The Fish Fall in Love uses copious amounts of mouthwatering vittles, not bedtime stories, to get what she wants. That's OK, though, since it's all pretty much the same thing.
Atieh (Roya Nonahali), the movie's modern-day Scheherazade, is introduced to us in the kitchen, of course, where we find her stirring her pots, tasting a dish, debating how much salt to add. This is a woman who takes her cooking seriously, who recites poetry to her pots and, when she senses danger, bids tearful goodbyes to her pans. Along with her daughter Touka (Golshifteh Farahani) and two feisty female friends, Atieh runs a popular restaurant on Iran's Caspian coast, a labor of love where the only ones who seem to have a better time than the diners are the women cooking up the food and serving it. Atieh and her companions are women on their own and unencumbered by men — again, not necessarily the characters you'd expect to meet in a film from Iran — and though they may cover their heads and hide beneath layers of shapeless clothes, these are tough cookies who know how to change a tire and even dare to smoke a cigarette from time to time.
The monkey wrench tossed into this steaming cauldron of female camaraderie and cuisine is Aziz (Reza Kianian), an old flame of Atieh's who has returned home after 22 years of wandering in the wilderness. The official story is that Aziz has been off gallivanting around the world, but what few know is that he was actually whisked away to prison for political activity — a fact withheld even from Atieh, causing her to wind up married to an abusive jerk, now conveniently deceased, who left her with a daughter and a pile of debt. Atieh doesn't even own the restaurant that bears her name — it's actually Aziz's long-abandoned family home — and the movie keeps its characters and us guessing whether the old lion has come home to reclaim the restaurant or to reconnect with his one true love.
It's Atieh's daughter (who, in an unnecessary subplot, seems doomed to relive her mother's mistakes) who hatches the One Thousand and One Nights scheme to keep Aziz so blissfully well-fed that he'll prolong selling the restaurant until he realizes that what he really wants is not the real estate but the girl. And so we get scene after scene involving the preparation and consumption of delectable regional specialties like grenadine chicken, kabobs noix, wild duck, Persian cassoulet, aubergine, sea trout, legumes and loving close-ups of dishes with colors of hallucinatory intensity and exotic names like Meadow Flower. Needless to say, this is not a film to see hungry.
The movie's a fairy tale, no use arguing that, but with a prickly, real-world underbelly. The Caspian coastal setting has a certain rough charm, but its wet, windswept streets, grimy industrial buildings and perennially overcast skies are far from your postcard image of a vacation spot. There's a gritty bottom note here, established almost immediately when (after a prologue in which we learn that wild fish are better than the farmed variety because they're not afraid to love) Aziz's driver is pulled over at a military checkpoint and whisked off in handcuffs. No one questions or explains the event, and we don't even see the man again until much later in the film, when we've practically forgotten him. Even when there's magic in the kitchen, the movie tends to keep one foot in the real world.
The Fish Fall in Love is the latest entry in Global Lens 2008, a fine international film series that doesn't get nearly enough attention from our local press. The director is Ali Raffi, a longtime academic with a background in theater, who survived both the Shah and the Ayatollahs, and who at age 70 is just making his first film. He keeps dialogue sparse (excluding those women who "talk too much to hide their feelings") and close-ups are usually reserved for the important stuff, like a plate of perfectly stuffed fish or a cup of tea being placed upon a table, just so.
Raffi's style is efficient and refreshingly rough, closer to post-Kiarostami naturalism than the stage-bound fussiness we might expect from someone rooted in the theater for half a century.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2008.