Iranian cinema has long been known for its poetic films and, more recently, for its intense dramas. But one oft-ignored Iranian genre is comedy, a rarity on the festival circuit.
In the Iranian box-office, however, comedies often do well. Soroush Sehhat’s Breakfast with Giraffes is one example. Although it hasn’t been shown in festivals, American audiences recently had a chance to see it in a series of special screenings in Boston, Washington and New York, where it was a special screening prelude to the 3rd Iranian Film Festival New York. It will also soon be screened in Germany.
Being a comedy doesn’t always make a film less intense or even less forlorn. The Iranian films have a reputation of leaving you a little depressed and Breakfast with Giraffes doesn’t break from that tradition. But it’s nevertheless a bona fide comedy: it makes you laugh just before you notice how hard it hit you.
The film revolves around a wedding party. Pooya (Hootan Shakiba) and Shahin (Bijan Banafshehkhah) are all dressed up to go. The groom, Reza (Pejman Jamshidi) is a cousin of their good friend Mojtaba (Bahram Radan.) It is a traditional wedding where guests are segregated by gender and have to sit around round tables, busying themselves with fruits and sweets. It is an alien environment for Pooya and Shahin who come from a different milieu and a different world. They are way over-dressed, complete with bowties, and have little in common with the stout men in worn-out suits, quietly peeling tangerines and passing them around the table. Reza is stuck between wanting to entertain his friends and his hard-ass soon-to-be brother-in-law Saeed (Majid Yousefi) who follows him like a shadow and bans him from such mundane activities as eating a nectarine (he suggests something less splash-probe like a banana.)
This clash of worlds, between the hip friends and the simpler guests, between the two sides of Reza’s life, sets the tone for the film. If social dramas try to capture the brutalities of daily life in Iran, Breakfast with Giraffe uses a comical portray of contradictions to show how absurd life in today’s Iran can be.
Pooya and Shahin manage to get Mojtaba and Reza away from the eagle-eyed Saeed and into a utilities room where they can let loose some steam, primarily by consuming copious amounts of cocaine. How else to sit through this tedious wedding? Now, the very Reza who was banned from a nectarine can’t get enough of the coke lines. He ends up losing consciousness and the rest of the film tells the adventurous story of how his friends try to save his life and maybe his marriage.
Sehhat’s adoption of an absurdist style is both apt and done in a particular way. Like most absurdist or surreal works, the basic rational logic is suspended in some of the film’s elements. We see a man fall from a few floors without breaking a bone. In a memorable scene, we see two groups of characters inexplicably break into a pretend Italian to flirt with each other. But the film doesn’t go far in this direction. It never quite becomes nihilist or fully abstract. It keeps the fundamentals of a narrative. This way, it remains watchable and compelling.
The film artfully weaves absurdism into another sub-genre: buddy movies. This is a story of a few buddies engaged in activities that are typical, perhaps even stereotypical, of Iranian men: getting high together, going together to a villa outside town, putting some kebab on the grill. Iranian women, who play a heroic role in all spheres of life, have often been portrayed in Iranian cinema. But Breakfast with Giraffes is a study in Iranian masculinity and all its pitfalls. The men of the film each suffer from their own relationship crises. Shahin is a divorcee. Pooya finds out his girlfriend is cheating on him. Whenever the group meets a group of women, a game of flirtations begin, like the notable scene with the make-believe Italian. The film’s success is rooted in how it balances out these genre sensibilities, different as they are.
The very title of the film gives out a surreal flavor. The title drop occurs in the utilities room when Reza muses about going to a resort in Langata, a suburb of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, where guests mingle with giraffes and even have breakfast with them. This hotel exists in real life but the absurdism here is contextual. Reza repeatedly reminds us that he has worked several years to be able to afford a very modest wedding party. In what world could a middle-class Iranian like him afford a trip to Kenya and a stay at the Giraffe Manor? (I checked and it costs anywhere between 1200 to 2500 US dollars a night.) In another absurdist event, as soon as Mojtaba hears the name Langata, he says he knows where it is since “I am a taxi driver, I know all addresses.” As if, one could get a Snap (Iran’s version of Uber) all the way to Nairobi.
Sehhat thus weaves together absurdist elements into a compelling story line, delivering a film that is just like the Iran of today: getting by but surreally. This is a world in which men and women resort to a made-up language to flirt; one in which even relatively well-to-do folks have to resort to cocaine to get through a night; one in which having breakfast with giraffes is both an implausible dream and one that seems to be just about possible.
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