Obviously, Mohammad Rasoulof's ‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig" is Being Praised, But it's Not Palme Worthy

Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was going to be praised no matter what. It certainly wasn’t going to get planned. Life comes before art when it comes to this film.

The minute the exiled Iranian filmmaker entered the Palais for the screening of his film he was met with a standing ovation, and one that was well merited as this man has been through hell and back — sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran, but surprisingly escaping.

Once the film ended, the crowd stood up and roared, giving the film, and its director, a record-breaking 12-minute standing ovation.

The first 90 minutes of ‘Seed’ are pretty incredible. A family man, Iman, living with his two 20-something daughters and wife in a Tehran apartment, has just been promoted as judge by the Iranian government, but his promotion comes as the country enters a state of unrest. Riots break out, paralleling the recent ones that actually happened, when a girl was killed by authorities for not wearing her hijab.

A man of morals, Iman is reluctant to sign off on the countless execution papers he receives on a daily basis, by the hundreds. Meanwhile, his daughters are embroiled in protests everywhere they go, with one of their friends being badly disfigured. In a scene that is hard to shake, they shelter the girl and help her wounded face. Iman’s wife stays neutral, she believes the government’s story that the unveiled girl who sparked the protests actually died of a heart attack and not police brutality.

In the film’s first 90 minutes we are thrust into the political unrest, Rasoulof has Iman’s daughter looking at real-life and hard-to-watch footage of victims lying in the streets bloody, some of them alive, on her phone. It’s harrowing cinema. Militant cinema. It’s not hard to understand why the Iranian regime wanted to silence Rasoulof.

The film then hits narrative bumps, Iman’s gun, which he is forced to carry everywhere he goes, as part of his job, goes missing in the apartment and that’s when he starts to suspect his own family. Paranoia enters the picture and Iman slowly becomes a man he once frowned upon. The second hour is less successful, almost feeling like a different film altogether. At 150 minutes, Rasoulof’s film has passion to spare, but there’s a sense that he’s quite literally lost the plot.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that reviews for “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” are great, and, in many of them, you read between the lines as critics try to spin the flawed second hour while still maintaining a sense of praise for Rasoulof and his brave film.

Will “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” win the Palme d’Or? I have a hunch that it might, but it would be a tad too anticlimactic and, sadly, not deserving. It would certainly send a big middle finger to the Iranian government and, I guess, there’s a satisfaction to that, but there were far worthier films in competition this year, from the likes of Baker, Fargeat, Lanthimos, Audiard, Abassi, Von Horn and Kapadia.