Fireworks Wednesday

If you’re wondering why Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed third feature, Fireworks Wednesday, hasn’t gotten an American release until now—ten years after its original release in Iran—the answer is unsurprising, if depressingly familiar: money. In 2006, Asghar Farhadi was a less recognized name internationally than Jafar Panahi, whose Offside was released the same year, thus "saturating" the market for Iranian film in the United States, at least as far as film distributors were concerned. So while Fireworks Wednesday’s original American release was limited to the festival circuit, its belated distribution ten years later—after A Separation (2011) and The Past (2013) have cemented Farhadi as one of modern cinema’s great humanist filmmakers—amends that mistake, proving why Farhadi deserves to be mentioned alongside his compatriots Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami (though his style, tone, and subjects differ markedly from them).

​Named after the Iranian holiday Chahar Shanbeh Suri—the Iranian New Year’s Eve, when revelers light firecrackers on the streets to commemorate lost spirits and the passing of time--Fireworks Wednesday might also refer to the emotional fireworks that go off among a group of families in Tehran. We see much of the film through the eyes of Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti), who is overjoyed at her upcoming wedding (though she and her fiancé have no money) and greets every new person with wide-open curiosity and a beaming smile.
 
It’s this buoyant personality that allows her to enter the upper-class families of a Tehran apartment building, one of which has hired her as a temporary maid. As soon as she steps foot in her employers’ lush apartment, she knows she’s entering a battleground: the husband, Morteza (Hamid Farrokhnezhad), has a bandaged hand from punching a glass window the night before, and all of the furniture has been covered in plastic wrap in preparation for the family’s upcoming move to Dubai. His wife, Mojdeh (Hediyeh Tehrani), appears mentally unstable and obsessed with the possibility that her husband is cheating on her, but her constant state of fragile distrust might be the result of an unhappy marriage we can't initially comprehend.
 
Soon, Mojdeh enlists Rouhi’s help in determining her husband’s infidelity, sending her as a spy into her neighbor’s beauty salon. At first Rouhi seems to enjoy this play-acting—she knows real emotions are at stake but relishes uncovering the secrets these people conceal—but the story becomes more urgent with a late revelation that throws everything we knew beforehand into question (not unlike A Separation or Farhadi’s fourth film, About Elly, which was also rereleased in American theaters last year). Fireworks Wednesday often plays like a mystery, but the emotional clues are hidden within quick lines of dialogue and telling human gestures; as usual, Farhadi’s plotting is meticulous and precisely paced, revealing only as much as he needs to in a given scene (credit also goes to Farhadi’s co-screenwriter, the director Mani Haghighi).

As in About Elly and A Separation, the social commentary is woven into the characters’ interactions; Farhadi’s films aren't explicitly political, but through their heated conflicts we come to know a modern Iranian community and its multiple, layered tensions. Rouhi comes from a poor family and needs to take the bus or taxi across Tehran to get to her employers’ upper-class apartment building; for her, saving up for a wedding dress is a huge purchase, a symbol for the long, happy marriage she thinks awaits her. The arguments, custody battles, and divorces of the wealthier families surrounding her shake her optimistic core and cloud her assumptions about the people who live so many stories up in high-rise apartments. The social context here is less critical than in A Separation and less gendered than in About Elly, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of the characters’ crises and their subtly shifting relationships with the people around them.
 
Although Fireworks Wednesday put Farhadi on the international map, this was still a very low budget endeavor, which is reflected in the effectively simple production. The film stock is both brightly colored and murky at times (which shouldn’t be read as a criticism), the camerawork often consists of static shots, and the sound design is rooted in realism, picking up the cacophony of fireworks in the nearby streets. Such a minimal aesthetic approach fits Farhadi’s observant tone perfectly; as often happens with “naturalistic” movies shot on a small budget with imperfect equipment, the world it evokes seems realer than reality.
 
With Farhadi’s first two features (Dancing in the Dust and Beautiful City) and a slew of television and theatre work behind him, one hopes that this rush of re-released material keeps coming. As his work continues to gain greater exposure in the U.S., the growing career of a master filmmaker comes into sharper focus, detailing how Farhadi’s subtlety, complexity, ambition, and narrative precision have matured over the years, all the time wedded to characters whose pains and joys are universal. His preternatural grasp of plotting and cinematography has led critics to compare him to Renoir, or among his own countrymen to the pained humanism of Mohsen Makhmalbaf. But the movie that most often came to mind while I watched Fireworks Wednesday was Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D., with its themes of class inequality and touching insistence on treating every single character with the respect and sensitivity they deserve. Most importantly, both De Sica and Farhadi’s films share an ambivalence about existence summed up in two undeniable truths less contradictory than they seem: life is painful, life is beautiful.

Originally published by Joyless Creatures (April 26, 2016).

Fireworks Wednesday

Grade: A–

Runtime: 102m.
Country: Iran
Premiere: February 1, 2006 (Fajr Film Festival)
US Release: March 16, 2016

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Producer: Jamal Sadatian
Writers: Asghar Farhadi, Mani Haghighi
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Cinematography: Hossein Jafarian
Editor: Hayedeh Safiyari
Cast: Hamid Farokhnezhad, Hadiyeh Tehrani, Taraneh Alidoosti, Pantea Bahram