The Hunter

The Hunter – A curious mismatch between existential anomie and muted thriller, the two parts of this 2010 Iranian film, The Hunter, doesn’t really cohere.  The first half of the movie is an exercise in studied, morose alienation.  The mute and sullen hero is an ex-con who works as a night watchman.  He wants to be assigned the day-shift but rather implausibly his boss says “no” because the hero, played by the gaunt and scowling director, Rafi Pitts, has been in jail.  This is merely one of a number of scenes that rings false and seems contrived to heap the maximum misery on our poor protagonist.  Despite his dour demeanor, the hero is married and has a cute kid.  Unfortunately, wife and child are killed in an off-stage “gun-battle with insurgents.”  This part of the picture is effective if depressing.  The hero comes home to an empty apartment, can’t find his wife, and, later, learns that she has been killed in the crossfire between cops and bad guys.  His daughter is missing and the hero searches for her, encountering a, more or less, desultory government apparatus that doesn’t seem to care – this is another bizarre aspect of the film, either things are worse in the Iranian republic than we thought or the film is completely contrived in order to make its rather simple-minded points.  (I suspect the latter.)  Finally, the hero finds that his daughter has been killed.  For some reason, this causes him to mount a high hill on the outskirts of Tehran and shoot a couple of cops at long-distance with his hunting rifle.  This part of the picture is completely inexplicable.  And what follows is equally unexplained – somehow, the cops figure out the identity of the assassin and pursue him, again at great distance and haphazardly, by helicopter.  The protagonist flees to the seashore and, then, drives recklessly through the mountains.  The cops chase him and, after a crash, he leads them on a hunt through mountainous and completely empty terrain.  What follows is a fairly gripping variation on the famous Pine Barrens episode of The Sopranos.  Two moronic cops finally catch our man, but find themselves completely lost in the woods.  They can’t get their handcuffed prisoner back to the highway and, then, a hard rain begins to fall and the night is cold and…  Rafi Pitts seems to have some of the impulses of a Western-style action director and the traipsing about in the woods is reasonably exciting in a grim kind of way.  The chase on mountain roads is also pretty effective.  But the movie is comprised is clichés and the main character’s behavior is both absurd and predictable once the European Art Film genre features of the picture are grasped.  The photography is pretty.  Tehran looks like a nice city and the mountainous landscapes in the last third of the film are impressive.  The German hegemony over Europe seemingly extends to film production not only on that continent but also in the Middle East.  Financiers with ZDF in Berlin produced the movie – it has Iranian credits, but the accountants and lawyers are all German.  Just about every art film that you see nowadays seems to be, at least, half made with German money, all state-subsidized.  The cash that the Germans once invested in world domination or the Wirstschaftwunder, they now put into baubles of this sort.