The White Meadows (2009) User Reviews

A film of stark visual beauty

[howard.schumann · 9/10 · 16 March 2012]

Last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Mohammad Rasoulof, Iranian director of the allegorical fable The White Meadows, spoke out against the Tehran regime saying "I come from a country full of contradictions and suffering, where there is a dictatorship," and "censorship does not allow me to talk openly about what happens in my country." The following March, both Rasoulof and world-acclaimed director Jafir Panahi were arrested as part of the government's reaction to those claiming that the election of President Ahmadinejad in June 2009 election was a fraud. Rasoulof was released shortly after his arrest in March but Panahi remained in prison until the following May.

The White Meadows, Rasoulof's mesmerizing and poetic film about an old man who travels to places of sorrow to collect tears, appears to be a disguised attack on the perils of religious dogmatism, though it also can be taken simply as a surreal Kafkaesque nightmare. Set in Lake Urmia close to Azerbaijan, Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi), an aging boatman, visits the region's white salt islands to collect people's tears in a glass vial. "I've come to listen to people's heartaches and take away tears," he says as he rows among the gray waters in the third-largest saltwater lake in the world. It is an otherworldly landscape.

Rahmat encounters many tales of grief and sees many injustices but he is powerless to intervene. He has been doing this for thirty years and the people cooperate because they believe that their tears will turn into pearls. What he does with the tears is not fully explained. We see him first at a funeral for a young woman whose body was preserved in salt until Rahmat can take her off the island and dispose of her body. It is not clear how the woman died but the implication is clear that she was killed, possibly by stoning, by having too provocative a figure. One of the villagers tells Rahmat that it was good that she had died because she was "too beautiful to live among us". She could not be buried on the island because lustful men would dig up her body and violate the corpse.

When Rahmat takes her in his boat, he uncovers her far from shore only to find a very much alive teenage boy, Nassim (Younes Ghazali), who snuck off the island so that he can look for his father. Rahmat first throws young Nissim into the cruel waters then relents and says that the boy can go with him if he pretends to be his deaf and mute son. Recalling that tears can turn into pearls, the naïve youngster steals a jar full of tears and is severely reprimanded by Rahmat when discovered. At the next island, a beautiful young virgin, dressed for a wedding, is offered as a bride to the sea to appease the sea gods. No one does anything to stop this barbaric action and Rahmat is content to fill up more vials of tears.

At the last minute Nissim swims out to sea to try and rescue her but he is intercepted and brought back to the island to be stoned by the elders. Rahmat saves his life but the boy is severely injured and once again the powerful succeed at the expense of the compassionate. On the next island, a crippled dwarf (Omid Zare) is chosen to deliver the secrets of the villagers (whispered into a glass jar) to the fairies at the bottom of a well before daylight. Fearing that he will not make it in time, the rope is cut and he perishes. An even more bizarre occurrence takes place at the next island. The White Meadows is an upsetting film filled with many tears, but it is a film of stark visual beauty aided by the powerful imagery of Ebrahim Ghafouri's camera-work. The film makes a strong statement about the need for morality and justice.

masterful and mysterious

[eduardo10075 · 9/10 · 18 October 2010]

I saw this recently at the Vancouver Film Festival, and was blown away. The visuals are stunning, and the characters interesting. Of course, there's a lot of symbolism that went over my head - hopefully others will explain here in later reviews.

The final scene is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Who is the old man, why are his feet washed, and wasn't the young woman pushing the chair the virgin who was sacrificed earlier? Also notice the painting on the wall, with the red sea.

For those with an open mind, this represents the best aspects of International, or "foreign" cinema.

Unexpected Brilliance

[zacknabo · 9/10 · 30 September 2016]

Shot on the islands of Iran's Lake Urmia, an area known for its salt formations Rasoulof's mythological, folkloric allegory is as mesmeric to the eye as it is to your soul. A film that people certainly love to look at as an allegorical allusion to the current socio-political state of Iran (specifically near the end of the aughts and into the teens), is much more, thanks to the intentional ambiguity of Rasoulof who keeps his symbolism obscure enough to avoid pretentious critics like me, as well as Iranian censors, but never obscure enough to ruin the film. Rasoulof and cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafouri's humanistic eye and poignantly subtle plot deftly avoid "artsy" vagueness as well as the staid burden that a "political" film can bring, thus effortlessly bringing about a film that touches something universal, while staying complex in its folk-riddles, simple in its sorrowful tales of the variations of the human condition, and cinematographically awe-inspiring in Ghafouri's use of the natural landscape to create a world only half-rooted in reality. The ethereal sense the film is given by the landscape: the mist, the water, the reflections, the dull white salty islands which all blur the line between foreground and sky, eliminating the horizon creating a duality of possible existences is essential to Rasoulof's myth creation. A result that is reminiscent of Theo Angelopoulos. The film centers around solemn, professional Rahmat (played excellently by Hasan Pourshirazi) who rows his skid from archaic community to community, collecting the tears of the sorrowful, who are shedding their tears for one reason or another, calmly bearing witness to different rituals, practices, superstitions and tales of the lake's unexplainable rise in salinity. One of the central ambiguities is why Rahmat collects the tears—no one seems to know. His first stop is an island where a young attractive girl has died. It is implied that she was murdered. It is remarked by one of the men that she moved her body in such a way, too beautiful to live among them any longer. Rahmat collects the tears and is asked to take the body of the girl and dump her into the depths of the lake, because her beauty and sexuality is so strong that they are frightened that the male members of the community will dig her body up and violate her. Rahmat agrees and after rowing far enough away from the island curiosity gets the better of him and he wants to see how beautiful the girl really is, but as he uncovers the shroud he finds a teenage boy, Nassim (Younes Ghazali) that is a very much alive and just as frightened as Rahmat. Nassim begs to come along with Rahmat relating to Rahmat that he only wants to find his long lost father. Rahmat relents vehemently, until Nassim threatens to tell the islanders that Rahmat wanted to steal a peak at the dead girl. Rahmat agrees only if Nassim pretends to be his deaf-mute son, so as not to make the other community of islanders distrust Rahmat who has been collecting tears of the sorrowful for thirty years. In one village a dwarf Khojatesh (Omid Zare), is reluctantly weighed down with glass jars filled with the townspeople's woes and secrets. The legend is that the jars must be delivered to the fairy at the bottom of a well just before sunrise, but when the townspeople in full chant realize that Khojatesh will not make it back in time they cut his rope and drop him to his death. It is really at this point where one becomes exceptionally impressed with Rasoulof and the way he depicts these people, not with vitriol and condescension, but with an objective humanitarian eye, which is refreshing and the only way that the film can succeed in the ways that it does. On another island a young virgin is made a "bride of the sea" and is ritualistically sacrificed to the ocean. She cries and screams, begging Rahmat to help, but he cannot interfere, but Nassim, tired of standing by tries to save the young girl to no avail. He is caught and nearly stoned to death; it is only through Rahmat finally becoming active in the events around him that saves Nassim from immediate death. The ending, which will not be spoiled, is as mystifying as the beginning, while Ghafouri, through emotionally expressive close-ups or long shots of Rahmat's boat slowly rowing across the mysterious waters like some odd version of the River Styx, or of mourners discernibly dotting the white salted islands maintains the beauty and ghostliness in every composition up until the credits roll, all on a limited budget and sparse palette, never failing to aid in the mythological language Rasoulof has so meticulously but naturally created amongst the misty waters connecting all the peoples of the salt.

Haunting Masterpiece

[pantelispa · 10/10 · 20 June 2010]

Mohammad Rasoulof's "The White Meadows" is a masterpiece that will creep deep in your skin and will haunt your memory for a long time. The allegory of the film is a punch into the stomach, it's imagery of insuperable beauty and the story line an anthropological journey into the very essence of human societies. The ambiguous main character of the film Rahman, reserves for the spectator a place on his boat. Following him the viewer collects the tears of humans patiently getting immersed in a overwhelming study of human sorrow. In Rahman's boat one glides from island to island beholding speechless the rites, customs and superstitions of an unknown, but very familiar society.

Art, as every human action, requires the combination of scarce means towards the achievement of valued ends. Rasoulof picks as the setting of his film the lake Daryacheh in the north of Iran, which is a landscape of utmost harshness and physical beauty. While the means of the filmmaker seem to be quite limited, Rasoulof exploits tremendously well the physical beauty of the lake. He sets before our eyes an archipelagos of islands and islets and gives us the impression of an endless world from where no escape is possible. In these extremities the director establishes his plot, reconstructing effectively an entire human society. As the movie progresses we get insights in the customs and the institutions of the people, a puzzle that won't be completed until the very last scene . Then, with a masterful regression the film starts again at its very end. The director attains an astonishing cinematic achievement, with very little means at his disposition.

One could claim that Rasoulof, is discovering his own language assimilating elements from Iranian and European Masters. The cinematography of the film is of extraordinary beauty. The director draws on canvases playing with the water, the mistiness, the reflections, the white rugged rock and the salty scenery to produce a stunning and dreamlike world. The imagery functions on a poetic level by way of symbols and allegory. Some of the images are so exceptional than converted into photography or poetry they could retain their forcefulness. The director moves slowly and carefully from a scene to another allowing us the time to sit comfortably in the stern of Rahman's boat and reflect on the nature of his world. The more we behold the people the more we can envisage how it would feel like to be among them. The journey that we undertake is a vicarious experience immersed into visceral emotions. In the White Meadows, Rasoulof is possibly learning from currents and directors like the Italian Neorealism, Kurastami, Tarkovski and Angelopoulos, however his attainment belongs distinguishably to Rasoulof.

The White Meadows can be seen as an allegory to the current political regime of Iran, nonetheless the message conveyed by it is universal. The characters of the film could stand as the prototypes of a disutopian Platonic state. Rahman, the main character, remains an illegible until the very end of the film. The rules of his profession are simple. He wanders like a country-side doctor ,to places where people are mourning, collecting their tears, unaffected by the plights of his patients. During the film, one might try in vain to find the driving elements of his behavior. The laymen of this society appear to be fearful and extremely concerned with their own superstitions to have any critical thought. A little renegade who represents the curious, passionate and adventurous mind and an artist who sees the world differently from his fellows are sacrificed in a setting that could be inspired by ancient Greek tragedy. The director was actually arrested along with Panahi on the 1st of March 2010.

In my humble view, Rasoulof, in his 37,has directed a masterpiece of utmost intricacy and aesthetic value. His work is one of those destined to reside in our memory for a long time. Thus, I hope that the White Meadows will find their way to the movie theaters, our memories and ultimately film history . In the meanwhile, I hope that Rasoulof will continue to deliver us great films and to ameliorate his artistic language, despite the difficulties encountered in his homeland.

A hauntingly beautiful allegory

[j_cangialosi · 9/10 · 27 November 2010]

A salted symbolism seems to evaporate off the screen in Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof's "The White Meadows". Rasoulof, who wrote, directed and produced "The White Meadows",is closely associated to the Iranian New Wave Movement of Cinema. The film was awarded the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature at the 2010 Denver Film Festival.

"The White Meadows" was edited by one of the Iranian New Wave's most prominent figures, Jafar Panahi. Along with "The White Meadows" cinematographer Ebrahim Ghafori, Rasoulof and Panahi were arrested by Iranian authorities on March 1, 2010. In this review of the film, there is just no way for me to tackle the complex web of issues surrounding Iran's oppression of its artists.

That said, as with several Iranian films, the suppressed freedom to express art and ideas in Iran hold an elemental place in "The White Meadows". Rasoulof's tale goes beyond the neo-realist qualities so often described in Iranian New Wave Cinema. The film is vividly real in its humanistic portrayals and natural landscapes, but under the folkloric lens of Rasoulof, Panahi and Ghafori it drifts into magic-realism.

Misery; nothing but human misery

[ushoys-71675 · 9/10 · 9 August 2020]

As if the natural world wasn't harsh enough, we bring so much misery upon ourselves and others. Humanity is hateful.

A powerful early Rasoulof composition

[dpbsubscriptions · 9/10 · 21 February 2024]

As with Rasoulof's "Iron Island" (2005) and "There is No Evil" (2020), this film features intense, rarely seen backgrounds, and like those films it is heavy with criticism of Iran's government.

Here Rasoulof allegorizes his government as an infirm old man who is sustained by the bitter and needless suffering of his people. The people collectively are suffering because the sea has become increasingly salty, and that leads them to brutal acts of superstition against various weak members of society. Several of the tokens of those brutal acts are drawn together in the second-to-last scene - dark red sandals (recalling an intentional drowning of a man unable to stand up for himself), a virgin sacrificed as a bride to the sea (to appease it and persuade it to be less salty), a stubborn vision of the sea as red rather than blue (for which an artist is blinded by having monkey urine poured into his eyes, and then banished to pointless labor on a barren rock in the midst of the sea). The most important symbol of suffering: the actual tears of the people, collected by the gruff main character and finally used as a kind of libation to the infirm old man.

The film was made on and near Lake Urmia, a saltwater lake in northern Iran that has greatly shrunk (and become harshly saline) due to drought.

One day, Iran will regard Rasoulof as an artistic master-hand of the nation. But not yet, alas.