Law of Tehran (2019)
(Metri shesh va nim)
Country: IR
Technical: col 131m
Director: Saeed Roustayi
Cast: Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Houman Kiai, Parinaz Izadyar, Farhad Aslani
Synopsis:
A narcotics sergeant never sees his wife because of working around the clock, but refuses to take the desk job while a powerful drug lord continues to distribute his crack cocaine around the city.
Review:
From its opening sequence of a fleeing suspect inadvertently buried in a hole by a bulldozer, Roustayi's excoriating look at the state of drug enforcement in contemporary Tehran is as emotionally raw as it is politically brazen. At times borrowing from the head to head posturing of Michael Mann's Heat, it is more often reminiscent of Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, or Maurice Pialat's Police, in its exhausting tirade of abuse. Eschewing conventional thriller content (car chases, shootouts - even the domestic asides), it reveals the inner workings of the police and judiciary, where reports can be rewritten after the fact while a police sergeant can be held in the custody bay with the other suspects. Scenes depicting the round up and processing of scores of suspected users have a casual inhumanity that later vignettes offset all the more poignantly: the boy reduced to taking responsibility for his father's crime, the smalltime hustler who gets himself into custody just so he can sell calls on his secreted mobile phone, and the chief quarry, himself, with his broken heart and impoverished family circle, who is just one more neck on top of so many others.
(Metri shesh va nim)
Country: IR
Technical: col 131m
Director: Saeed Roustayi
Cast: Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Houman Kiai, Parinaz Izadyar, Farhad Aslani
Synopsis:
A narcotics sergeant never sees his wife because of working around the clock, but refuses to take the desk job while a powerful drug lord continues to distribute his crack cocaine around the city.
Review:
From its opening sequence of a fleeing suspect inadvertently buried in a hole by a bulldozer, Roustayi's excoriating look at the state of drug enforcement in contemporary Tehran is as emotionally raw as it is politically brazen. At times borrowing from the head to head posturing of Michael Mann's Heat, it is more often reminiscent of Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, or Maurice Pialat's Police, in its exhausting tirade of abuse. Eschewing conventional thriller content (car chases, shootouts - even the domestic asides), it reveals the inner workings of the police and judiciary, where reports can be rewritten after the fact while a police sergeant can be held in the custody bay with the other suspects. Scenes depicting the round up and processing of scores of suspected users have a casual inhumanity that later vignettes offset all the more poignantly: the boy reduced to taking responsibility for his father's crime, the smalltime hustler who gets himself into custody just so he can sell calls on his secreted mobile phone, and the chief quarry, himself, with his broken heart and impoverished family circle, who is just one more neck on top of so many others.
(Metri shesh va nim)
Country: IR
Technical: col 131m
Director: Saeed Roustayi
Cast: Payman Maadi, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Houman Kiai, Parinaz Izadyar, Farhad Aslani
Synopsis:
A narcotics sergeant never sees his wife because of working around the clock, but refuses to take the desk job while a powerful drug lord continues to distribute his crack cocaine around the city.
Review:
From its opening sequence of a fleeing suspect inadvertently buried in a hole by a bulldozer, Roustayi's excoriating look at the state of drug enforcement in contemporary Tehran is as emotionally raw as it is politically brazen. At times borrowing from the head to head posturing of Michael Mann's Heat, it is more often reminiscent of Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, or Maurice Pialat's Police, in its exhausting tirade of abuse. Eschewing conventional thriller content (car chases, shootouts - even the domestic asides), it reveals the inner workings of the police and judiciary, where reports can be rewritten after the fact while a police sergeant can be held in the custody bay with the other suspects. Scenes depicting the round up and processing of scores of suspected users have a casual inhumanity that later vignettes offset all the more poignantly: the boy reduced to taking responsibility for his father's crime, the smalltime hustler who gets himself into custody just so he can sell calls on his secreted mobile phone, and the chief quarry, himself, with his broken heart and impoverished family circle, who is just one more neck on top of so many others.