Film: The Hunter
Release date: 28th February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 92 mins
Director: Rafi Pitts
Starring: Rafi Pitts, Mitra Hajjar, All Nicksaulat, Hassan Ghalenoi
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Iran/Germany
Since making his first feature film, 1997’s Season Five, London-trained Iranian director Rafi Pitts has gradually established a reputation as a central figure in the new wave of Iranian cinema. His latest film, 2010’s The Hunter, is a brooding, intense drama about a Tehran man whose life is turned upside down following the deaths of his wife and daughter in a shoot-out between police and insurgents.
Recently released from prison for an unspecified crime, Ali (played by Pitts himself) is pleased to be reunited with his wife Sara and young daughter Saba, but frustrated that the only job he can find is as a factory night watchman. His working hours mean that he doesn’t get to see his family much, and his only real pleasure other than the time he gets to spend with his wife and daughter is hunting in a forest on the outskirts of the city.
One day Ali comes home to his flat to find his wife and daughter missing, and after waiting in vain for their return, he decides to go the police. Hours later, after being treated with indifference bordering on disdain, he is finally told by the police that his wife has been killed, but there is no word about his daughter.
A fruitless search for Saba ends when her body is finally discovered and Ali is called in to identify her corpse at the morgue, but he seems incapable of confronting the reality of their deaths and allowing his grief to surface. He visits his parents but acts as though everything is as normal and says nothing of the deaths of Sara and Saba. Soon after, he commits a shocking crime that forces him to go on the run, with two very different policemen in pursuit…
On the surface, The Hunter has the appearance of two different films joined together in a slightly unwieldy fashion: the first, a tragic drama set mainly in a dispiriting urban Tehran leading up to elections; and the second, a rural chase thriller set in the secluded woodlands that Ali once hunted in. There have been plenty of glib descriptions of The Hunter as a film in which the hunter becomes the hunted, or in which the line between hunter and hunted becomes blurred, but that doesn’t do justice to a film that is more than just sum of these two parts.
The two parts of The Hunter may jar, but how can they not? Ali is, to put it mildly, an emotionally reserved man who does not know how to deal with the fact that the two people he loved most in life have been torn away from him, not temporarily by imprisonment or the demands of his job, but permanently through death. Ali broods over their loss, and even after committing the act that sets off the second part of the film, he shows very little emotion.
The chase scenes in the second part of the film are actually fairly brief, and refreshingly unspectacular, and once they are over, The Hunter once again becomes an intense human drama, albeit with very different protagonists, bar Ali. Some viewers will be frustrated by Ali’s lack of emotion, but it’s a major part of what makes The Hunter so intriguing. Where other characters are relatively transparent, Ali is opaque and difficult to read. Even when he snaps and turns to violence, he gives very little away, and we can only guess at what is going on in his mind. Some critics have questioned Pitts’s decision to cast himself in the lead role, but apparently this was a last minute decision that was forced on the director when his chosen lead turned up for filming in an unfit state.
Pitts’s undemonstrative performance may have divided critics, but few have questioned the work of cinematographer Mohammad Davudi, who invests Tehran with all the qualities of a bleakly alienating dystopia, dominated by muted colours and gloomy, utilitarian architecture. Davudi’s eye for detail and atmosphere is no less impressive in the latter part of the film, when the camera moves from foggy car chase to dank woodlands.
One of the most thought provoking aspects of The Hunter is one that has been overlooked by many critics: the relationship between the two policemen who arrest Ali, and the way in which Ali eventually pays a cruel price for showing more humanity than either of them. One of the policemen is an unwilling conscript from the military, the other a volatile thug who seems to have a history of taking the law into his own hands. The way this relationship plays out is unexpected, and raises uncomfortable questions about the future of Iran.
The Hunter is, in essence, the kind of film that raises more questions than it answers, and the character of Ali may strike some viewers as being too thinly sketched to properly engage with, but give it a chance and you may well be won over by its uncompromising minimalism. JG
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