Here's something you don't see everyday: a heist movie from Iran. Directed by Jafar Panahi ("The Circle", "The White Balloon") from a screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami ("Ten"), "Crimson Gold" takes a subversive look at life in Iran.
Opening with an arresting jewellery store heist sequence (shot in a single take, the static camera moving slowly in on the action as things go from bad to worse), the rest of "Crimson Gold" backtracks to the period just before the botched heist, outlining the events that build up to its bloody tragedy.
Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin) is a Tehran pizza delivery rider sharing his aimless existence with future brother-in-law Ali (Kamyar Sheisi). After being insulted by a storeowner, who refuses to let him into his shop because he's not wealthy enough, the taciturn war veteran becomes increasingly conscious of the split in Iranian society between those with money and those without it.
Following Hussein on his pizza deliveries, director Panahi offers tantalising images of Tehran's repressive regime, from illegal apartment parties (where the army wait downstairs to ambush the departing guests, arresting them for drinking alcohol and wearing perfume) to the easy affluence of those wealthy enough to find some leeway with the authorities.
Employing languid takes to capture the irony of Hussein's social immobility even as he flits around the city on his motorbike, Panahi's class-conscious storyline may be infuriatingly minimalist, but it's held together by a quietly subversive willingness to question the dead-end frustrations of life under totalitarianism.
"If you want to arrest a thief, you'll have to arrest the world," claims the philosophising professional hoodlum, from whom Hussein and Ali receive an impromptu lesson in the ethics of stealing at the beginning of the film. In a city where snatch squads roam the streets making random arrests, it seems that everyone is a potential criminal.
In Iranian, with English subtitles.
Crimson Gold (Talaye sorgh) (2003)