Hadi Khanmohammadi | The Word / 2021

i don’t even want to learn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hadi Khanmohammadi (screenwriter and director) The Word / 2021 [15 minutes]

 

Iranian director Hadi Khanmohammadi’s short film The Word is a most unpleasant piece in Turkish instead of what one might expect, Farsi. Perhaps Khanmohammadi, who remains in Iran, felt that he could not make such a work in his nation’s own language without endangering himself.

     A young man (Ali Ashrakijou) is teaching his recalcitrant father (Karim Ashari) how to drive, for reasons, one suspects, that have to do with his desire to be freed from driving his father around, allowing the son to spend more time with his friend Hamid, who calls him on the cellphone twice during their driving lesson. But his father insists: “I don’t even want to learn.”

     His father refuses to follow his son’s advice about how to change gears, and, in fact, has difficulty even getting the car to start. But even after it begins to move, he ignores his son’s insistence to change into second gear, thus wearing out the motor.

      The son comments on his stubbornness, his refusal to listen to anyone else, the old man complaining that he simply refuses to listen to his wife, who is constantly airing her viewpoints. But the son is equally disturbed by their relationship, arguing that he beats his wife, something the father refuses.

       Just as quickly, however, the conversation turns to his dislike of his son, the cause, he contends, of all the arguments between him as his wife.

       Although he’s sent his son to university, the boy evidently can’t find a job, the older man arguing that he should take any position in a firm, even a janitor, and work his way up. Clearly, the elder cannot recognize that things don’t work as they might have in a different age, the son refusing to even listen to such nonsense. He already has a degree, his son explains, how can we work as a janitor?; who might even hire him for such a lowly position? But subtleties are not something the father might ever be able to comprehend. He once more stalls the car out, and must begin over again.

     With the car moving off once more, this time speeding, the older man refuses his son’s request to slow down. Again he insists that the son is the main problem. “We’re still cleaning up your shit. You are the main problem. You agitate her against me.” From that accusation he goes on to suggest that his son his trying to make him homeless. The boy, however, explains that he merely asked him to put the house up for collateral in order to get a loan to help him get started. But his father is certain he will waste the money, and then he’ll be homeless.

      Although the boy wanted the loan so that he might open a “hypermarket,” we do wonder if perhaps the father isn’t right about the situation to a certain degree. Would the boy be able to make a go of it? Unfortunately, throughout the film both men make charges against each other that we simply can’t corroborate and have no knowledge of the facts.

      But the father argues that his father never gave him a penny, and he had to work by laboring. Everything he’s done has been by working like a horse. And now his son his bossing him around.

      The son dismisses his achievements, suggesting that all his labors haven’t gotten him very far.

      Yet we do perceive that the father is not blind to everything, at one point insisting upon what all such traditionalists do, “Find a girl to marry. Then you live the way you want.”

      The son protests, “Stop it, for God’s sake.”

       “Why do you avoid the topic of marriage,” the father asks.

     “You think I don’t understand anything, ha? …But you’re always loafing around with those guys. With the deviant friend of yours. Who you walk around with, hand in hand. And you always sleep over at his damn house.”

       The son protests, “Are you insane?”

      “Why should two guys stay together over night?” the father probes. You’re either drinking or smoking. Or maybe you are…”

       Even the father cannot say the word, will not complete the sentence since in Iran any gay activity is punishable by imprisonment, some acts ending in a sentence of death.

       The son turns the conversation to his own father’s defects.

       But this time his comments on what a miserable person his father is and his father’s faults goes to far. As the car lurches to a stop again, the son complaining that his father cannot do anything, that he fails at all, the older man exits the car for a smoke, finally calling out his son. When the boy hesitantly goes to him he slaps he face and attempts to wrestle him to the ground, the son flattening out his father on the front car hood.

       As his boy stumbles away, the father gets back in the car and speeds off past his walking son. But soon after we hear the squeal of tires as if there has been a crash. The son climbs to a nearby hill to see ahead, perceiving that his father his fine, but that the front end of the car has jumped the small retaining wall, the father attempting to push it back onto the safety lane.

       The son finally arrives at the spot, gets into the car and backs it away from the retainer curb.

He waits to his father to join him as the son presumably returns him home.

       There can be no resolution for these two stubborn and failed men. There is no one to come out to in Iran. You can never admit to being who you truly are.

Los Angeles, March 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).