The Wastetown

Ahmad Bahrami’s follow-up to his Venice Horizon’s winning The Wasteland, marks the second of an intended trilogy (to be completed by a film title Waste Man), and it’s every bit as oppressive and handsomely shot in monochrome as the first. Also, despite its bleak subject matter, it has been distributed in Iran, although the censor made cuts to some of the implied violence.

There’s shades of Shakespeare’s blasted heath as we see Bemani (Baran Kowsari) pick her way towards a car breakers yard as the wind whistles through the wires that enclose it. The notion of death hangs heavily over the yard, which is full of the stacked carcasses of dead cars that creak and squeak as they shift in the wind. Each is waiting to be systematically crushed by the sort of hulking and groaning machine that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stephen King novel and which gathers significance as the film continues.

Bemani has been temporarily bailed from prison, where she has served a decade for the murder of her husband, with her son taken from her as a baby. Her brother-in-law Ebi (Ali Bagheri) works at the yard and, she hopes, holds the key to finding out her child’s whereabouts.

Bahrami shows how women come up against unremitting patriarchy in microcosm, as the yard is entirely the province of men, all of whom have their own hypocritical agenda, which Bemani systematically turns against them. The only other female presence is a dog, whose scavenging can be heard at key moments. As with Bahrami’s previous film, the effect of the drama is cumulative. The tension is built upon a looping repetition, from the graceful repeated camera moves from Masud Amini Tirani and Bahrami's plotting to Foad Gharemani’s baleful score, as Bemani has similar encounters with each of the men, that involve a door closing with an air of finality. This is a story in triplicate and the restraint of the performances and the use of sound design as much as visuals to bring home the shock of violence all add to the film’s brooding brutality.

While the whistling wind speaks of wilderness, the framing is claustrophobic, its 4:3 aspect ratio already trapping people in even before Bahrami begins to slowly but steadily crush out Bemani’s options despite offering some satisfaction in the moment. Revenge may be exacted but it's hard to come out a winner in a world where the machinery is designed to work against you.