Crimson Gold
by Jafar Panahi
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Azita Rayeji, Ehsan Amani, Hossain Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheisi, Shahram VaziriDirector: Jafar Panahi
Cinematographer: Hossein Jafarian
Editor: Jafar Panahi
Producer: Jafar Panahi
Writer: Abbas Kiarostami
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Persian (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-07-20
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Wellspring
Movie Reviews of Crimson Gold
Movie Review: Taste of cherry will carry us
Summary: 5 Stars
When truth reveals itself and the final act has to be carried out based on it, the final judgment automatically follows.
Was Cambodia an aberration? Or are all societies racked by war so sick of themselves that they are ready to obliterate themselves when righteous attempts of redemption fail?
Hossein is a hard working man who has served his society in war and now runs around feeding it, if not literally, at least figuratively. The well do can now order him into the night because they now have the new weapon needed to push the rest around, wealth.
The simplicity of this film belies its powerful commentary on the universal human condition. It could be Cambodia, Iran, Germany, Poland, or Algeria. Like the bureaucrats of Kurosawa's Ikiru, society forgets its pleasures and purpose when there is no tension, there of death by stomach cancer, and here by the suggested comraderrie of soldiers at the front. When the war is over, soldiers are separated by many flights of steps, and miles of uphill roads between a pizza oven and the mouth and stomach of a now well to do comrade. When the cancer ravaged patient is dead, the camaraderie stops too.
Hossein and his close friend and delivery colleague weave on his motorcycle through the thick field of "citizens" in Tehran swaying in the wild wind of traffic. This is a far cry from the serene motorcycle ride of the country doctor and the reporter in The Wind Will Carry Us. But the shots are the same. So is the background noise that covers conversation and turn it into a staccato of human emotions expressed in dissolving sounds.
Similarly, the answer to the anguished question of the main character of Taste of Cherry is given in an instant in the beginning scene. When you can't but make those around you suffer, then freedom to choose an exist is the most human of all decisions. By suicide in Taste of Cherry, motorcycle in the Wind Will Carry Us, and a clever combination of the two here, where just one person leaves on the motorcycle, and one commits the final act.
While his screen plays which Mr. Kiarostami chooses to also directs are generally set in natural and rural environments, Mr. Panahi's inherits the messy urban ones. He is a master for it. He knows of its light, motion, and sound. Or should I call it noise. The noise of unseen teeming urban life, even on the 32nd floor of a modern residential tower. The gurgling water stream of a mountain village is substituted by tight and long vistas of noisy streets and alleys. The thin, soft see-through curtain at the entry to the basement of a rural house where a young girl, who in her first love opens up to the meaning of a modern poem is substituted by an automatically locking woven metal security grille of a jewelry store where love is abstracted in rings and bracelets, not poetry, not poverty. The girl lives on, we assume to see her lover, but Hossein never makes back out from behind the curtain.
Are these deliberate parallels Mr. Kiarostami and Mr. Panahi are putting in front of us from movie to movie to movie, or simply the subconscious mastery of profoundly connected artists? Perhaps we can never know. But we thank them for letting us get a new view through the many curtains of human making.
Thus, you will enjoy this movie in an extended context if you also watch, at least, The Circle, The Wind Will Carry Us and Taste of Cherry. The universal theme is hard to miss, in each one like in a single poems, or all of them as a 24 FPS "divan" or oeuvre of two masters.
Summary of Crimson Gold
Award-winning filmmaker Jafar Panahi's (The White Balloon, The Circle) latest triumph is an intimate and absorbing drama about the ways in which the hypocrisies and slights of daily life can push otherwise reasonable people over the edge. Based on true events and written by acclaimed director Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry), CRIMSON GOLD is the story of Hussein, a humble pizza deliveryman who feels continually humiliated by the injustices he sees all around him. When his friend Ali finds a receipt for a stranger's necklace purchase, Hussein is stunned by its exceptionally high cost. He knows that his pitiful salary will never be enough to afford such a luxury. Soon after, he and Ali are refused entry to an uptown jewelry store because of their scruffy appearances; his rage over this slight sets off a series of events. But Hussein will taste the luxurious life for one night before his deep feelings of humiliation push him over the edge. DVD extras include: 5.1, trailer, subtitle control, weblinks, Interview with director Jafar PanahiTwo master filmmakers, Abba Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry) and Jafar Panahi (The Circle), team up as writer and director, respectively (as they did on 1996's The White Balloon), on Crimson Gold, a subtle tragedy about class conflict in Iran. Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin) is a lumbering veteran swollen by cortisone (for war-induced pain) and reduced to delivering pizzas at night. (He is frequently lost in a mental semi-fog during the days.) Witness to the rewards and vanities of the wealthy, insulted when a jewelry shop owner won't allow him in his store, and under pressure to get married, Hussein awkwardly aspires for higher ground but is more familiar with a life of marginal importance. When an eccentric socialite gives him a taste of luxury, something desperate is unleashed. Panahi brings his feel for and vision of the expansive ordinary, for the near-invisible forces churning within characters in seemingly throwaway circumstances. A haunting film. --Tom Keogh
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