Mehrdad Hasani | Adjustment / 2022

a suddenly necessary change in life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Farzad Ahmadi (screenplay), Mehrdad Hasani (director) Adjustment / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

Filmed in Iran by Persian director Mehrdad Hasani, the short film Adjustment is a work amazing to even be made in today’s Iran, despite the wonderful film directors there who continue to challenge the political and social systems.  

 

   In this case the subject is a nine-year-old boy, Shakrokh (Moeid Asoudeh), a boy deemed effeminate for wearing nail polish and other items of female attire. A reactionary group has already descended upon the school, demanding they dismiss him, citing the contents of his backpack: lipstick and nail polish, insisting on his ouster from the school. The parents maintain that they will not continue to allow their children to attending the school unless he is dismissed.

       A female friend gathers up the items they have tossed out from his backpack, returns them to the container, and carefully plants them on the windowsill where inside the child looks on this group attack on his behavior with fear and incomprehension.

       His gentle teacher (Jamshid Bahadori) tries to console him, while explaining that he has created all this trouble really for nothing. “Don’t come to school for a few days,” he advises, “Then I’ll come and bring you back.”

      In a beautiful but terrifying scene, Shakrokh makes his way home through a stony and brush-filled incline, to find his mother attempting to comfort him with a warm shower, but his father, understandably give the cultural dilemmas he faces, angry even to see his shaking son’s knees as he stand naked. He demands to the boy come to him, entreating the boy with yet another version of the homophobia and, even worse, the transgender hostility that surrounds rural (and urban) cultures everywhere: “You want me to lose face in front the villagers?” But in the next moment he is shouting: “Why are you doing this to me? Can’t you hear me?” The mother intervenes in an attempt to remind her husband that he is just a child, his behavior is not an attack on the adult but something that comes from within, inexplicable to the confused parents. Comforting him she explains he should stay the night at his aunt’s home.

      And into the rainy and stormy night, as in a Dicken’s tale, the boy is sent, afraid even to knock on his Aunt’s door since she is entertaining friends. He makes his way into a barn where his female friend (Fatemeh Moradi), perhaps even younger than him, waits, advising him to come there anymore, that her father will be angry. “My mom says I shouldn’t talk to you because you are a bad boy,” while adding that she doesn’t believe he is truly bad.

      Shahrokh escapes back into the rain and mud, having nowhere to go, finally returning to the empty school itself where he attempts to sleep, but is chilled that he has no choice but to return to his classroom with his lantern and backpack, now nearly freezing. He takes off his coat and finally the map of the world which hangs on the school wall—symbol of all the places to which he might possibly escape from his painful predicament—and covers himself with it like it were a blanket.

 

    The next morning his school mates reencounter the boy who they define as a girl, once more mocking him, slowly, one by one painting his face with mud. It is one of the most terrifying instances of bullying ever put to film, even more horrifying in some respects than the martial violence of most US films, that end in a bloody lip, even a broken nose. This boy has become a figure of the earth, a product of the soil itself.

     The teacher returns to see the boys now literally fighting, Shakrokh vainly attempting to regain some sense of self-worth. Once more Shakrokh runs off, this time with absolutely nowhere to go.

    Suddenly he comes across a local clothes-line with the traditional dress of a female villager, and putting on the dress and traditional scarf of the Iranian village woman, he returns to the school, begging his teacher to seat him with the girls. The wise teacher immediately does so, and his lessons continue, this time without interruption. His female friend tears off a piece of paper so that he/she may now also participate in the school lessons.

 

   As Letterboxd commentator williamfaeleith notes, that since the Iranian government does not recognize sexual orientation, there are presumably no homosexuals in Iran, only heterosexuals who commit homosexual acts (for which they can be sentenced to life imprisonment or death. On the other hand, it does recognize gender dysphoria and permits sexual reassignment surgery, so our young heroine, Shakrokh, is protected under law as long as she accepts the “adjustment” this child has had to make in his/her life.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2024).