Director: Sepideh Farsi (France, Gernany, Luxembourg, Belgium). Year of Release: 2023
1980 (I’m sure the opening credits say 1981 but all press materials say 1980), Abadan, Southern Iran. A wedding party or something – lots of drumming and clapping along to the music. A teenage kid is transfixed by the ritual beheading of a chicken. As the bird’s head is removed, blood drips upon the face of the young Omid. This is not the last time in the film in which he will be covered in blood. Later scenes will be much more gruesome.
Cut to: a kids’ football game in the shadow of a large oil refinery. The referee is distracted by the birds flying above the pitch. Some people call for a penalty, others say that was no way a foul. The ref makes it up as he goes along and points to the penalty spot. The kick just evades the goalkeeper and hits the back of the net. While all this is happening, Iraqi jets fly over the refinery dropping bombs. The looming edifice goes up in flames.
Omid, who has been keeping goal, rushes home on his bicycle. He has a bumfluff moustache and is obviously trying to look older than he really is. On the road in front of him, there is a truck full of soldiers heading towards the front for the new Gulf war. In the truck. Omid sees his brother Abed. Abed tells him to carry on home, while throwing his greatcoat onto the street. Omid fails to keep up with the truck and reluctantly picks up his brother’s greatcoat.
Back at home, Omid’s widowed mother is preparing to leave. Things have got too much, and she’s going to take her family to relative safety. Omid’s younger siblings are ready to go, but his grandfather does not want to leave Abadan. Reluctantly, Omid says that he wants to stay too. In part, he wants to remain in his home town, but also he’s busy training his chicken Sheer Khan (yes, the same name as the Jungle Book tiger) to take part in cock fights.
At first, Omid tries to follow Abed to the front, but his brother has told the army recruiters to make sure that he stays where he is. Omid persists and eventually finds himself carrying a Kalashnikov on the front line. War is, as they say, hell, although in one memorable scene, the shooting is interrupted while the troops on both side watch the same television programme. Nonetheless, Omid needs out, and uses the help of his brother’s friends to return home.
Omid helps out his friend Farshid, who delivers groceries to the people who have chosen to stay in Abadan. They visit an engineer who has opened up his house to a menagerie of cats, and Armenian Orthodox Christians in a monastery. Farshid tells him that one of the people on his round is Elaheh, the popular singer who has become a recluse since the revolution meant that she has been unable to make public concerts.
Cycling through an air raid, Farshid’s bike is hit. Farshid falls to the ground, bleeding. A girl runs out of a nearby house and instinctively uses her headscarf to stop the blood flowing from his wound. She looks around nervously, as much in fear of her mother as the religious police. Farshid is still laid up in hospital, and Omid takes over the round on his dead father’s moped. Omid is also transfixed by the girl, Pari, who it turns out is the daughter of the singer Elaheh.
Many German reviewers have struggled to understand Die Sirene. They find it difficult to process the fact that a film about post-revolutionary Iran could be about anything other than the evil which they feel is inherent in Islam. And yet, while we do see ripped posters of Khomeini on the walls, and there is some discontent about the new régime, this is primarily a film about the senselessness of a war in which no territory was won or lost, and the USA financed both sides.
Some reviews talk of the freedoms lost in the 1979 revolution, as if life under the Shah was a festival of liberation. It leaves them unable to explain why many Iranians willingly participated in the revolution or why so many young men, including Abed, went so willingly to fight. At one stage, the 14-year old Omid says that he’s a Communist. This doesn’t mean he celebrates the rule of the Mullahs, but he does have some understanding that what came before was even worse.
Credits at the end of the film tell us that the war ended in 1988 with no change to the borders, but the death of 1½ million people. La Sirene is a moving tale of people fighting for peace within this chaos. But is it any good? Well, sort of, but only up to a point. The film’s choice of form – a vividly coloured cartoon starring a 14-year old hero, somehow infantilised the film to me, making me feel like the target audience was people who watch Saturday morning kids tv.
Nothing wrong with watching kids tv, of course, but this slightly robs the film’s message of its seriousness. As the Iraqis besiege Abadan, and Omit facilitates a daring escape in a rusty oil tanker, it becomes a little too much of a Boys’ Own tale of derring-do, which has been abstracted from the horror of its historical setting. Or maybe I just watched the film in too po-faced a mood, and I should have just sat back and enjoyed the bright colours.
The obvious comparison is with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and – for me at least – Die Sirene does not benefit at all from this comparison. It lacks the lightness of touch of Satrapi’s graphic novel and film. This does not make La Sirene in any way bad – just something that has been done before and better. Maybe it matters that Die Sirene’s hero is a young boy who are, by default, less interesting than girls who proudly wear the slogan “punk is not ded” on their back.
CinePhil 