Nine vision of hell in Iran - and elsewhere

Daniel Nelson

Terrestrial Verses is a vivid depiction showing what happens when bureaucrats and managers have arbitrary power over individuals. It is like nine visions of personal hell.

Alireza Khatami and Ali Asgari place the tales in Iran, but in truth they could be set in scores of countries.

The victims sit facing the camera. The interviewers are not shown, except when a hand occasionally stretches into the frame.

The first story sets the tone. A new father tries to register his son as Daniel. He learns that Daniel is not on the acceptable names list. But it is the ensuing dialogue with the unseen registrar that jars - a mixture of Kafka, Monty Python and Soviet-style lack of any concept of serving the public.

As with many of the ensuing vignettes, the obduracy of the official is buttressed by a cast-iron certainty that he will be backed by a paternalistic, censorious, narrow-minded, dictatorial government.

In Selena, a young girl’s excitement at getting new clothes for a school ceremony is ground out of her as the saleswoman systematically reduces the colour and design options and increases the covering materials. And then tries to sell the mother a patching prayer mat.

Only one  of the victims in the stories - a schoolgirl forced to admit that she was driven to school by a boy on a motorbike and had visited a park with the same boy - manages to turn the tables on her all-powerful inquisitor. She escapes censure because she tells the teacher that she saw the teacher in the park, too, and has a photograph to prove it.

A woman being interviewed for a job with a private construction company rapidly becomes uncomfortable and fearful as it becomes obvious that the boss is not looking for office skills, but for sex.

Similarly, a man applying for a driving licence is told to take more and more of his clothes off as the official questions him about his tattoos.

The overall picture is extremely unpleasant: powerful, self-righteous, self-important, hypocritical, scuzzy interviewers getting pleasure out of making life difficult for ordinary people, usually using an unthinking interpretation of Islam.

It’s cutting but often funny, in a painful, even cruel way. It’s a simple, one-sided demolition of behaviour and attitudes in contemporary Iran.

The final snapshot is cataclysmic, the intention presumably being to say that piling such humiliations on the population will ultimately lead to regime collapse.

It’s a powerful indictment of the abuse of power.