No One Knows About Persian Cats (Sunday, April 25, 2010) (32)

This is a small movie about two twenty-something musicians, a man and a woman, who live in Tehran and want to get a permit from the government to perform in public and get their passports and visas so they can tour the world and play outside of their country. They are young rockers, not very different from young people in any country. They love music of all kinds and want to be able to enjoy it away from the government censors.

There is not a heck of a lot of plot in the film - basically you have the musicians trying to get their government documents and working with one musician after another to convince the authorities that they are safe and can be trusted. They work with one musician who has his visa, thinking that if they're in his band, they can get their documents too - but that doesn't work. Then they work with two women who are traditional Persian folk singers, hoping that if they have more than one female voice, the government will have less of an issue with their band. This doesn't work either.

As time goes on and they collaborate with more and more artists, they create a beautiful texture of musical and creative diversity in and around Tehran. The variety of styles is not different from what you would get in Williamsburg, Brooklyn or the Lower East Side. There is alt-indie-Rock, hip hop (in Farsi, but with a strong West Coast influence), traditional Brel-like French chanson (again in Farsi) and more straight-ahead singer-songwriter fare.

The music throughout the film is absolutely amazing. What director Bahman Ghobadi does brilliantly is to have the musicians meet their band-mates-of-the-day and start playing music, while he cuts to background, documentary footage of Tehran during the day and night. There is a quality reminiscent of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi here where the documentary footage gets tied to the music in a way that both the visual and the audio seem almost tied together. (Since seeing the movie, I have bought the soundtrack and can say that the diverse range of music is amazing just to listen to without any visual aide.)

This whole film is as much an ode to Tehran and it's creative energy as it is a narrative story. The fact that the story has this mumblecore-like non-structure helps underline the point that this is about freedom. Not freedom in a trite political sense - but freedom to think and breath and move and create without the bureaucrats telling you what to do. This film is saying that Iran is basically the same as Brooklyn - and would be considered exactly that were it not for the current oppressive regime. But the politics here are underneath the surface - the film is really about how art has no boundaries and is non-partisan. It's a lovely tale along the lines of the 2007 film Once - but with a much stronger focus on music and less on story.

Stars: 3 of 4 (4 of 4 for the music alone)