Daughter of the westernized upper middle class, who left at the age of 17 to study art in Los Angeles and remained in the United States because of the Islamic Revolution, Shirin Neshat is a special case. Celebrated in galleries and museums since the 1990s (her controversial series of photos Women of Allah), this now sixty-year-old lady even has a filmmaker husband who essentially put himself at her service, Shoja Azari, which earned her quite a bit of mistrust in the middle of the 7th art. However, she has what so many other filmmakers lack: a real artistic project and a cause, that of exiles and women from the Orient. All things that nourish deeply Land of Dreams, a third feature film made in New Mexico, at times wobbly but always surprising, with the added bonus of a nice performance by Matt Dillon.
Far West modern
She is also the daughter of Iranian refugees, the heroine of the film is called Simin, and like the author found herself very young in the United States. Her dreams sometimes send her back to the old world, but today, in her thirties, she has become a good little soldier for the United States Census Bureau. Always by the roads in a modern West, she goes from door to door to control the inhabitants, with to finish an optional request: to tell their last dream (“for your safety” is the only official explanation)… Where one suddenly discovers that it’s all played out in a slightly offbeat reality, as evidenced by his returns to futuristic offices. At the end of the interview, Simin got into the habit of asking to photograph those who told him about their dream. Photos that she uses for funny reinterpretations in Farsi that she films and posts on social networks!
This bizarre civil servant (some will have recognized the beautiful face of Sheila Vand, the vampire from A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014) one day receives the mission to go to a secret place in the desert where she finds Iranians parked like Indians in their reserve. On the way, she also meets Mark, a young wandering poet who declares his love for her. Between this love at first sight, the advances for a one-night stand from Alan, the agent assigned to him as a bodyguard (Matt Dillon), and the heartbreak of this unexpected return to the past, Simin tries as best he can to find his way around with his torn identity.
Claim defused
Past a dreamlike scene shrouded in white light and new age music that lets you fear the worst, the film manages to install a real climate of strangeness. Some will call him a “Lynchian”, but whoever knows the work of Shirin Neshat will rather recognize his personal touch with the luminosity and the very composed framings, without excluding this time a touch of surrealism and political satire surely encouraged by Carrière, l former accomplice of Luis Buñuel. The result is a film that is as visually striking as it is pleasant to follow, even if it is also the expression of disenchantment, just like the eponymous museum installation that preceded it.
Between Simin’s job as a “dream catcher” and his discovery of this “colony”, where former opponents of the revolution survive, instrumentalized and then forgotten, the parallel is easy to draw with the fate reserved for the American Indians. . A memorial made up of hundreds of portraits of victims suddenly confronts her with the image of her father, a murdered communist scientist. Then goes back the whole history of a country which was too often the plaything of Western interests, the CIA having a dirty role there from the 1950s. Hence a deep questioning: certainly, the dictatorship of the mullahs is a Horror, but if these United States, apparently so welcoming, were only a decoy? A whole series of deliberately grotesque scenes (not the best of the film), including a strange dinner presided over by Isabella Rossellini through interposed screens, say nothing else. Without forgetting these passages with a black artist or in a sect, where the politico-religious charge is suddenly well supported.
Tribute: Jean-Claude Carrière, a storyteller has fallen silent
Having become more aware but also doubly foreign, will the census agent be able to escape her censors?, to those who dream of global control like their own schizophrenia? In fact, the film is less about suspense – which is also valid on a sentimental level – than about poetic expression, the whole thing ending with a magnificent visual ritual. The limits and drifts of the American dream dissolve there as in a much older, immemorial dream of peace and unity, which would be that of all of humanity.
Land of Dreams , by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari (USA, Germany, 2021), with Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, William Moseley, Isabella Rossellini, Joaquin De Almeida, 1h53.
2023-07-04 19:33:54
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