Parviz Sayyad's “Dead End” was the final feature from the “Iranian New Wave: 1962-79” sidebar that I saw at MIFF this year, and it arguably has the simplest story out of them all. At times it almost comes across like a romantic comedy as we follow a young and naive girl who begins to fall in love with a man she often sees standing at the dead end of the street that she lives in with her mother. The unnamed girl is convinced that this man must be in love with her, but too shy to speak to either her or, as would be more appropriate in this culture, her mother. From there we then regularly see her fantasising about the man with her best friend, who is the more “experienced” of the two as she is already engaged, if she could just get her fiance to commit to starting the wedding plans. The two of them lay around each other's bedroom, dressed in their pyjamas, laughing and giggling about what-if scenarios if the man finally had the courage to speak to the girl. Her love gets so desperate, that she starts to make excuses to leave the house so he will follow her, just in the hope that he will finally talk to her and their romance can bloom. No matter what she tries, he cannot get the man to speak to her, until one day she stops at a cafe, and he then sits at her table.
“Dead End” is a beautiful film, but it is also a heartbreaking one too. A young teenage girl falling in love for the first time is always going to be idealistic in terms of love, and the girl in question here is just that. She believes this love is going to be it. There is no one else she could ever want, and he only has eyes for her. So much of “Dead End” we are actually inside the mind of this love-lust girl, as we constantly hear what she is thinking and / or fantasising about. She sits up on her window sill hidden behind her closed window, peeking through the crack in the curtain, wondering what the man is up to or chastising him for his lack of action. When the two do finally meet and talk, she asks him questions and then we amusingly hear her thoughts immediately after she asks the question, embarrassed by how stupid or pointless it was. When she does find a topic of conversation the man does like talking about, his dialogue slowly fades out as she dreamily gets lost in his eyes and voice, and we hear her thoughts about how much she loves this man.
The girl is played by a charismatic Mary Apick, who is the very definition of “cute as a button”. Her eyes are so expressive, and she handles the naivety of her character with aplomb. It is very believable that this is a lonely girl's first taste of love, and all of the wonderful new feelings that that brings. The girl's mother is played by Mary Apick's real life mother Apick Youssefian. As you would expect, the two of them have wonderful chemistry together, and I was particularly impressed by the worry Youssefian was able to convey when her daughter stops eating due to her obsession with her new love. She senses that her daughter is also extremely lonely, especially now that her older brother has moved out of the family home, and she encourages the girl to put herself out there and find someone to love, which unbeknown to her at the time, is the perfect advice the girl wants to here at that given moment. While we never get to know or be with the man for any real amount of time, Parviz Bahador is good in the role, as he comes across as both charming and intelligent, and it is easy to see why this girl would fall for him. I will say that he is much older than the girl, but the way love and marriage is handled in Iran is so different to the western world, so while both his and her actions may come across as a little odd to us, they are quite normal to the characters themselves.
The film has been beautifully shot, and I loved the scenes when the director leaned into the artifice of his set. I am not sure on this, but the whole film may have been shot on an elaborate street set, however there are times when director Parviz Sayyad deliberately exposes that he is shooting on a set, like the opening shot of the balcony window (which looks like something out of “Rear Window”), or the scene when the camera goes “through” the wall to the next room, or the scene near the end when we see both sides of the front door, with the girl on one side, and the man on the other. I love these little moments and I also really liked how the film as a whole had allusions to “Romeo and Juliet” with the young girl looking out from her balcony window to the man she loves, but who may not be loved by the rest of her family.
As that last sentence hints at, there is a twist in the tail of “Dead End” but sadly I worked it out very early thanks to the MIFF guide's description of the film, or so I thought. When I went back and looked at it, the guide actually does a pretty good job of hiding what happens at the end, so I guess the film itself signposts what potentially could happen at it's end. It is safe to say that the title of the film has a double meaning, but I should stress that the darkest interpretation of that title is not what happens so do not stress there. I must say that I thought the final freeze-framed image of “Dead End” was brilliant, with the girls big eyes expressing her horror as the truth of her situation finally hits her. It is brilliant yes, but I wont deny that it is also heartbreaking too.
Overall, I thought “Dead End” was a lovely, if overly naive romantic drama. It has been sweetly acted by the women in the film who make us believe there is nothing better in life than to love and be loved in return. However is this love and longing a realistic dream in a country that his been built on the pillars of fear and surveillance? While not as deep as some of the Iranian films I watched as part of this side bar, “Dead End” was none the less a very entertaining watch.
3 Stars.
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