Ashkan Mehri | Mani / 2020

innocence and guilt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ashkan Mehri (screenwriter and director) Mani / 2020 [16 minutes]

 

Iranian writer and director Ashkan Mehri’s short film Mani is a bit like two Russian dolls, the one nestled into the other. Mehri’s central figure, 12-year-old Mani (Taha Seyf), is absolutely in love with his family’s driver (Milad Moaveri), a totally innocent love affair, that given his attempts to be around the driver at all times, reveals an illicit and not at-all innocent affair between his mother (Vesal Roozkhash) and the driver the moment the father leaves on a business trip.

     Indeed, actions in Mani’s world that might outwardly seem sexually perverted or even criminal are truly without any sexual intent and totally virtuous. The driver is able to touch, hold, and even fondle the delighted boy who is given apparently clandestine swimming lessons each day after school in an adult-only swimming pool where the driver becomes his instructor.

      To cover up his smoking, the driver douses himself with a male perfume which, again to Mani’s pleasure, he also dabs on Mani’s neck. Mani strokes the older man’s neck and even gives him a kiss on the neck as he pleads for him to stop at a Kinderstop and an Apple computer store.

      When the driver isn’t looking, Mani steals his leftover gum from the top of his cigarette pack, holing in away almost as treasure in a small tin where it joins other wads that he apparently chews in secret just to share the saliva of his adult lover, smelling it before popping it later into his own mouth.

      In the dark of the night, after hearing the car return to their driveway, Mani sneaks onto the balcony—his room door is apparently locked from the outside—to watch his mother climb the stairs with the driver, moving toward their bedroom for a truly illicit and immoral affair.

      We have no idea, however, how the innocent boy interprets the events. Clearly he knows that his mother and the driver are engaged in sex: he later observes them in bed together. But does he judge it as an immoral act or is he simply intrigued, almost envious that she can lure him into her bed, while he cannot? Is he simply happy to have the driver in the house with him?

      Mani certainly goes out of his way to push open a door to downstairs where a large plaster stature has been put up to foil to illegal entry, sneaking upstairs to hear their lovemaking.

      Back in his room, unable to sleep, he again slips out and through connecting balconies peers into his parents’ bedroom to watch the couple, masturbating with wide-open eyes.

      In the morning, he is allowed to engage in a boy’s Freudian orgy as he climbs into the bed where his mother sleeps, snuggling up to her as he takes in the musk of the driver’s perfume and body odors from the pillow.

      Strange to say, in a few years Mani will probably be wracked with a sense of guilt with memories of having been, as a young gay boy, drawn to his mother’s bed by his boyhood idol, while the truly guilty mother will have perhaps completely forgotten about her affair with the family driver.

      This simple narrative film is filled with issues that later help to define individuals’ lives, including the differences between being a child and an adult, of acting out simple urges or knowingly engaging with them, and living in a cocoon of innocence or spreading out one’s wings to embrace guilt.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).