follow parallel lines: morals vs. morals and, more provocatively, morals vs. ethics. If moral clashes debate right and wrong, then we can look at ethics as the power plays dramatizing stubbornly opposed views of what’s right.
Farhadi’s latest, “A Hero,” centers on that second debate. It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting. The film, a two-hour exercise in simmering anxiety and the slow fuse of a big little lie, makes its streaming premiere Jan. 21 on Amazon Prime, while continuing its limited theatrical run in the Chicago area.
The setting is the Iranian city of Shiraz. There, Rahim, played by Amir Jadidi with an air of serene resignation, has been jailed in debtors’ prison. The scowling creditor controlling his fate helped Rahim start a business — he’s a calligrapher and painter by trade — but he wants his loans repaid. Rahim needs money, quickly, in order to buy his way out of prison and settle the debts while on a two-day pass.
The money he needs pops into the story as a kind of street-level miracle. His clandestine girlfriend, Farkhondeh , finds a handbag full of gold coins, left behind at a bus stop. At first she and Rahim plan to pawn the coins. Then, instead, Rahim’s ethical impulse takes the lead and the money is returned to its rightful if furtive owner. Rahim becomes a media hero, and a model prisoner for his prison overseers.
But fate, various forms of Iranian bureaucracy and simmering grudges, reroute Rahim’s sudden celebrity. Like all Farhadi’s work, “A Hero” operates as a calmly agonizing procedural, where one evasion or deception naturally squirms into the form of another, and another. There are some new elements in Farhadi’s focus here: the role of social media in ordinary lives, for one, and — visually — some conspicuous change-ups in the cutting of some sequences and montages.