This is the first film that I have seen by Jafar Panahi. I wanted to watch Crimson Gold first because it was written by Abbas Kiarostami, and I wanted to see how his writing was treated when it was being directed by somebody else. I don’t think I would have picked up on Kiarostami’s participation in this without already knowing about it, as the only thing that I noticed that was particularly Kiarostami-esque was that the film was somewhat structured around traveling. Hussein, the protagonist and a pizza delivery man, rides on his motor bike from the pizza shop to deliver pizzas to various fancy homes, and can’t seem to have a smooth shift. The middle act of the film is centered around a mansion that is having a dance party of some sort. Outside, though, some form of police is waiting to pick out the people entering and leaving the party, as it breaks some sort of code that restricts men and women from dancing with one another. When Hussein arrives to deliver a pizza at the mansion, he is pulled into the situation and not allowed to leave or deliver the pizzas. Later, he is delivering pizza to a lavish condo, and the man living there, who ordered pizza for himself and two women who left before the delivery, invites Hussein into his home to eat and chat with him. While the rich man blathers on and on about his disdain for the city and his general joylessness, Hussein inhales the pizzas. The antagonism of members of different classes provides the infrastructure for this film, and renders well the quiet hopelessness and hostility that builds up in this particular member of the working class.
The film has an interesting formal structure that shows Hussein’s fate in the first shot of the film, and then spends the rest of the film showing the events that built up to that moment. While the film does show a convincing portrait of a nice and innocent man being driven to crime by society, it doesn’t make excuses for Hussein’s final behavior, and doesn’t make the final scene in the jewelry store out to be some kind of inescapable fate. The logic of the events is very loose and subtle. Hussein’s time wandering through the rich man’s condo, the penultimate scene of the film, is complex because it isn’t clear whether Hussein is angered by what he sees and hears or if he is entertained by it. He falls into the swimming pool, and I couldn’t tell if it was his awkward way of diving in, or if he fainted. He stares out at the city pensively, and burps up his pizza, and I didn’t know whether to find this moment humorous or somewhat disturbing.
Hussein is acted well by Hossain Emadeddin, playing him as someone who isn’t insane and still functions in the world without being perceived as an outcast, but who can also believably go off the rails at any moment. I am unsure about the decision to show Hussein’s fate at the beginning of the film, as I think I was less engaged in his behavior than I should have been. Since I know what he will end up doing, I looked for certain things in his personality that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and probably missed out on much of the complexity that was put into Hussein’s character. It is an effective film, though, and I enjoyed watching it.