A World Apart
By Sarah Fensom
The Stranger and the Fog
Dir. Bahrām Beyzaie, Iran, 1974, Janus Films
The setting of Bahrām’s Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog (1974) is a small village on the north coast of Iran. At its edge is a strip of shoreline that is, as the film’s title suggests, nearly always crowned by a diadem of dense haze. The film, which is almost unforgiving in its succession of gorgeously photographed imagery, is about what reaches through this liminal boundary from the outside world: the stranger of the title, but also paranoia, love, death, and danger, both very real and existential. The majority of the village’s occupants push firmly against these invasions, believing that life in this misty, isolated place can only sustain itself peacefully if it goes untouched by outside forces. Events ultimately prove them devastatingly right.
At the heart of The Stranger and the Fog is the beautiful Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi), whose moods are so central to the village’s understanding of itself that when she’s sad women call her mere presence a bad omen. But when she smiles, men and boys dance through the marketplace. Rana’s husband has been missing for a year when his wooden fishing boat washes ashore. The man inside isn’t her husband, but a wounded foreigner named Ayat (Khosrow Shojazadeh). The villagers try to help Ayat remember more about who he is and how he ended up stranded, but he can’t seem to recall the details, or perhaps he doesn’t want to. The people of the village struggle to decide whether to welcome the affable Ayat or dismiss him, so they set up various tests and provisions for allowing him to stay. One is that he must marry a local woman, and later there’s tug-of-war and a drinking contest (he cheats at all of them). That Ayat chooses Rana for his bride contributes poorly to his reputation, and a number of men oppose him before he outwits them, though he and Rana seem to forge a happy union.
The paranoia the stranger’s presence once stoked in the villagers seems to transfer to Ayat himself as he grows obsessed with the notion that men will arrive from the sea to abduct him. In a striking, Tarkovsky-esque sequence, Rana sees Ayat running to the water’s edge to check for boats as she dresses for their wedding. As she watches through a window, she closes the panes, the empty shore reflecting in the glass and slowly overwhelming her.
Men do eventually arrive, but their visages are so haunting that it’s hard to tell if they’re just figments of Ayat’s delusions. When it’s revealed that they are a real threat to Ayat and the village, the villagers band together to defeat them, with Rana striking many of them down herself. But in a move that recalls Greek tragedy or Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the stranger is so overcome by the knowledge of his own fate that he gets in a boat and disappears into the horizon anyway, leaving the village and the life he could have had there behind.
Before he began making films, Beyzaie was a playwright, stage director, and theater historian of illustrious reputation—so much so that he has been dubbed “The Shakespeare of Persia.” He comes from a family of poets, including his father, Ne’matallah Beyzai (who published under the pseudonym Zokā’i); his grandfather, Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Ārani (“Ebn Ruh”); his great-grandfather, Mulla Mohammad-Faqih Ārāni (“Ruh’ol-Amin”); and his uncle, Adib Beyzaie, one of the most celebrated Iranian poets of the 20th century. Beyzaie’s lineage seems to have had a profound influence on the lyrical quality of his imagery and the classical style of his writing for the screen. The Stranger and the Fog was the first of his films that Beyzaie cut himself, and he has since edited the lion’s share of his own work, like Ballad of Tara (1979) and Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989), as well as works by other filmmakers, like Amir Naderi’s acclaimed 1984 film The Runner.
Unlike several of the filmmaker’s peers in the Iranian New Wave, like Sohrab Shahid-Saless and Abbas Kiarostami, who pulled from the Italian neorealist tradition and the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ermanno Olmi, Beyzaie takes his cues from some of world cinema’s more robust and sensuous stylists, such as Federico Fellini, Sergei Parajanov, and, most significantly, another Shakespearean acolyte, Akira Kurosawa. Throughout the film, Beyzaie utilizes a recurring montage technique similar to Fellini’s, wherein characters speak to, or just beyond the camera, as it moves past them, creating a strange and purely cinematic momentum as it rapidly cuts from one speaker to the next. Just as Peter Watkins does in Edvard Munch, another 1974 film of comparable ambition and scope, Beyzaie utilizes this technique to round up the opinions of the townspeople, here specifically gauging their feelings about Ayat and his ongoing presence in the village.
Much of the blocking and composition of The Stranger and the Fog brings to mind the bucolic beauty of Parajanov, with each new shot presenting the viewer an image akin to a delicately structured stanza. Beyzaie often favors frontal compositions, like those in The Color of Pomegranates (1969), which bring to mind folk art paintings and underscore the film’s rural environs and characters. While other key figures in the New Wave favored duration and long takes, Beyzaie seems to be pulling from the origins of the Iranian New Wave, creating a film that bares the formal stamp of Forough Farrokhzad’s 1962 documentary drama The House Is Black. Like Farrokhzad’s tempo, Beyzaie’s pacing is quick, as if he can’t show the viewer enough of his beautiful imagery and exposures.
In the film’s finale, the debt Beyzaie owes Kurosawa becomes obvious, as the climactic battle rages throughout the village and its outskirts in a muddy, unrelenting downpour. In much the same way that the Japanese master depicts his protagonists in Seven Samurai (1954), the battle’s combatants are exhausted and more pathetically human than heroic. Their relentless hope is only to vanquish the threat that pierced the fog.