The President movie review & film summary (2016)

Once the President and grandson don tattered disguises—and he picks up a guitar, which allows him to claim they are street musicians—they begin an odyssey across the country, hoping to be rescued by a boat once they reach the water. The journey takes them through a catalogue of the horrors and chaos that follow a revolution. Hordes of starving people flee from rampaging soldiers who do their worst to the helpless refugees.

Some of these episodes are quite arresting in a nightmarish way. In one, a happy wedding party is stopped by soldiers, one of whom takes the bride into a shed and rapes her. Emerging, she raves at her male fellow captives for not helping her, and begs the soldiers to shoot her. In another scene, a group of former prisoners reaches the home of one, who says the memory is his wife was all that kept him going. Makhmalbaf never takes his camera off the man’s face as he knocks, hears the cry of a baby too young to be his, and listens as his wife tells him she married another man during his long absence.

In the latter scene, as well as another showing the President’s encounter with an embittered prostitute, we hear about the brutality of his rule, the executions, injustice and torture he was responsible for. But since these concern fictional constructs rather than a man and a country with recognizable histories, they have little dramatic weight. Likewise, though the film’s conclusion is viscerally harrowing (and very well staged, like most of the movie), its attempt to say something about how cycles of violence need to be ended in order for democracy to succeed tyranny seems vague and pat.

Perhaps the most interesting angle on this tale concerns Makhmalbaf’s own history. He was a teenage Islamist terrorist when he participated in an attack on one of the former Shah’s police stations, wounded a young policemen, was captured and then spent four years in prison under torture, until being released by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. After he started making films, he gradually evolved from a fundamentalist into a very committed humanist. In a way, “The President” suggests that it may contain his feelings about his nation’s last monarch. If he’d had the chance in 1979, would he have killed the fleeing Shah? Would he now, if he could project himself back in time, or would he advocate mercy for the man he and many regarded as his nation’s greatest enemy?