Whenever an Iranian film is awarded at a big festival, the temptation to watch it is hard to resist. After watching the trailer the wait was more painful as it was mesmerizing.
Recently, I managed to watch long waited 'The Wasteland' and it left me speechless for a while because of the magical power it possesses. The story is basically about labor exploitation based on the lives of some oppressed, deprived people. Ahmad Bahrami, the director, crafted it with delicate hands, a long monochromatic poetry, likely inspired by Bela Tarr, and daramatised it.
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From a distance, the brickfield looks like a mound of earth where the wind always plays a haunting melody and carries misfortune. Not only economically, where the owners always try to exploit those people even physically and morally.
Deceived by many false promises, lotfollah, Ibrahim, Shahu, and Sarvar will survive in this God-forsaken land.
Lotfollah, the right-hand man of the owner, is our main character and the strangest of them all. It seems like He has a wonderful ability to keep everyone bewitched like a magician. All are helpless to his strong gravitational pull except Sarvar, to whom Lotfollah feels a strange attraction.
The film is solely crafted with a repetitive Main sequence, where the owner announced his idea about shutting down the brickfield, which is followed by other sequences. When Lotfollah locked all the doors after everyone had left, We assume the movie might be finished but the director had different plans. He wants us to feel the unbearable loneliness of lotfollah, besides in isolation how he engraved himself completely.
Iranian cinema is always special to me. From Kiarosrami to Rasoulof, and now in the hands of these youngsters, glorious Iranian cinema will shine even further, for sure.
THE WASTELAND
(DASHTE KHAMOUSH)
Directed by Ahmad Bahrami
Iran, 2020