56/100
Not at Cannes for Farhadi’s latest (really the only Competition title that remotely excites me on paper) so figured I might as well watch the one remaining film I hadn’t yet seen. Unlike Dancing in the Dust, this is very recognizably Farhadian, introducing a morally-tinged scenario which gradually gets more and more complicated; like Dancing in the Dust, alas, it’s predicated on customs so specifically Iranian that they’re kinda hard for viewers unfamiliar with them to even grasp the nature of. I get the concept of “blood money” being paid to a murder victim’s relatives in lieu of the murderer being executed—repugnant though that seems to me, it does at least have an analogue in American civil law, e.g. O.J. Simpson being ordered to pay $33.5 million to the Goldman and Brown families after he was inexplicably acquitted in his criminal trial. At a certain point, though, Beautiful City starts to hinge upon whether the victim’s father can come up with enough cash to pay the state to speed up the murderer’s execution, which whaa? I’m sure it’s accurate, but it’s also so insane, from my Western perspective, that it all but bodily yanks me out of the narrative. Add to that a subsequent knot-twist that will spare the murderer (whose side we’re expressly on; he was 16 at the time and intended it to be a Romeo-and-Juliet-style murder-suicide) if his best friend will marry the victim’s severely disabled half-sister and I’m left appreciating the film almost exclusively on an intellectual level. Characterize that as a Me Problem, if you like. Farhadi still hadn't embraced the camera—the formal gulf between this film and Fireworks Wednesday, just two years later, is striking—and leans hard on his formidable cast, which includes former mainstay (she hasn't worked with him since The Salesman, has apparently been coping with some sort of nightmare immunological reaction in recent years) Taraneh Alidoosti. It's definitely nobody's fault that the male lead, Babak Ansari, looks like he should be playing Reese on an Iranian Malcolm in the Middle.