Starring: Taraneh Alidoosti, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Ali Bagheri
Distributor: Vendetta Films
Runtime: 107 mins. Reviewed in Mar 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A married couple believe they meet their doppelgängers in Tehran.
With its enigmatic title and no explicit explanation, this is a mysterious film. A quick review would say: Which is which? Followed by Who is who? Then questions of how and why. For many decades, Iranian cinema has been of world standard, winning many awards, especially from Catholic, ecumenical and Interfaith juries.
The setting of Subtraction is Tehran in the 2020s, with Iran very much as a secular society rather than religious. The screenplay could be easily adapted to any culture.
The film opens with a brawl in a corridor. This enigmatic start leaves audience puzzled but, later in the film, this becomes highly significant, leading to dramatic complications – kindness and violence. Then the camera pans across, in close-up, the windows of a number of cars caught in a traffic jam, eventually returning to two women – the younger is receiving a driving lesson from the older instructor. Suddenly, the instructor gets out of the car, notices a man, follows him onto a bus, gets out, sees him going to a building then with the woman on an upper storey.
And, it is raining. It rains throughout the film, with the comment made that the North Pole is collapsing causing unseasonable weather; effects of climate change.
Perhaps it is best to say this is a film about people who discover their doubles, their doppelgänger, erroneously thinking that they may be twins. Dramatically, of course, this is a huge challenge to the central actors who have to take both parts and who have to make them, sometimes similar, sometimes quite different. The characters, of course, are puzzled by their exact image in another person. The audience is puzzled, sometimes confused, and a reminder of that initial question as we watch particular sequences, which is which, who is who?
The issue might have been sorted out happily, especially with the driving instructor who is pregnant, on medication, but apprehensive, warned by the doctor to be careful about the effect of medication on the baby. Her husband is a plumber and conscientious. One of the supporting characters is her kind and understanding father-in-law. However, the other couple lives in tension. The husband is the one who was involved in the brawl initially. There is some alienation from his patient wife. They have a rather precocious seven-year-old son.
The dramatic effect of the puzzling and confusion is the challenge to audience emotions – whom they like, whom they dislike. With all the best intentions in the world, there is an attempt to make peace with the victim of the brawl, now hospitalised, his family keeping vigil in the hospital, wanting vengeance – and meting it out.
The final 20 minutes of the film is rather unexpected, centred on taking the little boy to a national football match, but consequences for each of the four characters which they, and we, do not anticipate.
Some commentators have noted that there are elements of film noir in the screenplay echoes of some films such as Vertigo – definitely so by the end. However, this is a probing of identity, feelings, relationships and emotional confusion.
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