In an Iranian fashion store, a girl stands in front of a mirror and dances. It's called Selena. Pink headphones, baggy jeans, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, sneakers. A cool appearance. Selena could also be shopping on the Zeil or another shopping street in Germany. But she lives in a world where her style isn't really intended. There will soon be a so-called commitment ceremony at school. This marks the end of her childhood and Selena has to submit to the rules that apply to women in public in Iran. Even shopping for the ceremony gives a foretaste. Selena loves bright colors, and if she absolutely has to wear a veil, maybe a red one? The saleswoman routinely shrugs things off. Red doesn't work. And anyway, it would be best for Selena's mother to buy a set for her daughter: a veil with an integrated headscarf. You can always add a flower crown on top if it all looks a bit too gray on gray.
She looks a bit like a scarecrow
The scene with Selena in the film “Earthly Verses” is filmed in such a way that only the girl is in the frame the entire time. The saleswoman and the mother remain off-camera, only occasionally handing out more pieces until the girl is finally almost completely hidden under modest textiles. Selena looks a bit like a scarecrow now. But that's the point of it. The two directors and screenwriters Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami also make it clear that religious fashion is good business. Although Selena probably comes from a family that isn't doing badly. Many details in “Earthly Verses” remain implicit. The film is limited to excerpts. And in a perfectly composed form: nine scenes in which a character confronts an entity. Nine case stories from everyday life in a regime that intervenes heavily in people's lives, that draws the boundaries of private life significantly differently than in Germany, for example, and that always puts religious rules first. This leads to strong ironies that Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami repeatedly highlight without unduly emphasizing them. If you take all the scenes together, you get an idea of life in a theocracy that you have never seen before with this conciseness and with this conceptual intelligence.
In the first scene, a young man comes to a counter. Here, too, the other person is only present with his voice: a bureaucrat with whom you can register a name for your child. In this case the child will be named David. David in English pronunciation. The mother has a favorite author who also has that name, so the choice of name has a motive, a place in life. The man offscreen cannot comply with the wish. David is not an Iranian name, but a Western one. How about Hossein Gholam instead? The dialogue goes back and forth for a few minutes, the authors artfully play with linguistic facets between Farsi and Arabic, between religious and secular literature, between what is assumed to be the dominant culture in Iran and what is rejected as Western. By the way, this culture is in flux all the time, as is quite clear to the officials and experts who only ever appear in “Earthly Verses”.
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