Gozaresh

EN

“Kiarostami made his debut in commercial cinema […] at a time of great creative effervescence, severe economic crisis and high political tension. The Report reflects all these factors in one way or another, and the director himself openly recognizes this: ‘I called it The Report because I wanted to make a kind of chronicle of life in Tehran in the years before the Revolution, about the extraordinary pressures people felt, their financial problems, the black job market.’ We see a close-up of the credits being typed out on a piece of paper, anticipating the coldness of Kiarostami’s stance throughout the film, entirely removed from any concession to drama, even less to moralizing. Under his surgical knife, this harrowing report is in the first instance the portrait of a marital crisis; it is not hard to see the parallels with the difficulties that the director’s own marriage was going through at the time, which would soon culminate in separation. Even if his own films made during these years did not clearly show it, Kiarostami has on occasion owned that he was extremely unhappy at this time, his profound pessimism only partly overcome with the passing of the years. Apart from insignificant details, Firuzkui, the afflicted tax inspector in The Report, is very like Kiarostami himself, and their trials are also similar. Godfrey Cheshire, who has talked to the director personally on several occasions, even speaks of a critical self-portrait: 'The callow, shifty husband in The Report - with his expensive aviator glasses and foppish 70s moustache accentuating a weak chin - is a self-portrait etched in acid, a lacerating description of personal weakness casually destroying a fragile network of work and family ties.’”

Alberto Elena1

“Arguably Kiarostami's least-known great film, part of the difficultly in accessing this compelling marriage drama lies in the fact that it was screened in Iran during the last months of the Pahlavi reign, when the country was gripped by strikes, demonstrations and acts of revolutionary violence – hardly the time for cinema, even if the film did relatively well. Shortly afterwards, when the revolution succeeded, the film – like so many other Iranian films showing nudity, sex or even unveiled women – was banned. The original elements of the film believed to be destroyed during the revolution and the copies in circulation have an unexpected cut in the middle of a scene of intimacy between the two leading characters, suggesting that it has been cut out after the revolution.

According to Iranian film critic Nima Hassani-Nasab, the film was totally conscious of the chaos which lay ahead: “The characters of the film are torn between a desire to revolt on one hand and cowardice and social inaction on the other. This conflict plunges them into dissatisfaction and fills them with hatred for both themselves and the repetitious cycle of life they live.’”

Ehsan Khoshbakht2

“The Report [Gozaresh] presents itself as a small urban chronicle, describing the life of a middle-class couple in which the wife struggles for recognition, as opposed to almost all of Kiarostami's later films, which are set in the countryside, village life or the microcosm of schools. Here, there's no emotion, no enchantment, no surprise, just the brutal reality of pre-revolutionary Iran. We are shown a corrupt man, who goes to the casino in the evening to gamble away the sums he has been able to extort during the day from people who have come to his office at the Ministry of Finance, and this man seems as much at grips with himself as with the whole of the society around him. While Kiarostami never attempts to explain the motives behind his character's behavior - this is not a militant film - he perfectly dismantles the mechanisms of corruption. [...]

The Report could have been a film noir if the social environment had been so fractured as to provoke that surge of adversaries that gives crime, revolt and confrontation their raison d'être. But here, nothing, nothing but a society that is inexorably disintegrating, like the Firuzkui couple whose sentimental and sexual fiasco is the perfect illustration - a unique case in Kiarostami's cinema. The film is as dark as the light in which all the sequences are bathed; it unfolds slowly, with no rough edges, no music and no effects.”

Eric Fournier3

• 1Alberto Elena, The Cinema of Abbas Kiarostami (London: Saqi, 2005), 43-45.
• 2Ehsan Khoshbakht, “Gozaresh [The Report] (Abbas Kiarostami, 1977),” Notes on Cinematograph (blog), 10 August 2019.
• 3Eric Fournier, “Le Rapport”, in Petite Bibliothèque des Cahiers du Cinéma: Abbas Kiarostami (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2008), 189-190. Translation by Hannes Verhoustraete.