Nov 14 2014

TDS/TCR (Rosewater)

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A Journalist Imprisoned in Iran, Escaping With Ghosts

By MANOHLA DARGIS, The New York Times

NOV. 13, 2014

Among its virtues, “Rosewater,” the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, is an argument for filmmakers to start their trade after they’ve looked beyond the limits of their own horizons. This fictional movie tells the story of the real Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-born journalist living in London who was arrested in Iran while covering the 2009 elections for Newsweek. Accused of being an agent for foreign intelligence organizations, he was thrown into the Evin Prison, where he was interrogated and beaten, partly for the surreal reason that he had appeared on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” Mr. Stewart’s interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.

Mr. Stewart adapted the movie from Mr. Bahari’s 2011 memoir, which was written with Aimee Molloy and published as “Then They Came for Me” but has been promotionally repackaged as “Rosewater.” The book’s original title echoes the oft-quoted line from the German pastor Martin Niemöller, “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” As a famous call to speaking out (originally against Nazism), it underscores the universal tug of Mr. Bahari’s ordeal even as it carries the complicating weight of the Holocaust. “Rosewater” is the better title, partly because, as Mr. Stewart makes clear, it’s the specifics of Mr. Bahari’s story – his voice, memories, fantasies, ghosts and abiding love of Leonard Cohen – that distinguishes it.

In interviews, Mr. Bahari has described his ordeal as Kafkaesque. That’s a familiar modern shorthand for bizarre, impenetrable nightmares and fitting here given that Mr. Bahari was accused of phantom crimes, like being a Zionist. That’s getting ahead of the story, however, which begins in 2009 or maybe, really, in 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution. Or perhaps it begins in 1953, when the United States and Britain backed a coup d’état that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, cementing the shah’s power and contributing to the anti-Americanism that – in all its absurd and deadly serious iterations – is spectacularly on display in “Rosewater.”

Jon Stewart, Newsweek and ‘Mr. Rosewater’

By Gogo Lidz, Newsweek

11/13/14 at 6:55 AM

Bahari and dozens of other journalists were arrested for their reporting on demonstrations in Tehran in the months after a disputed presidential election (in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner in a landslide with only two-thirds of the vote counted). Taken to Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, Bahari was held in solitary confinement, blindfolded, beaten, tortured and coerced, under threat of execution, into giving a false, televised confession of spying.

In the words of Bahari’s rosewater-scented interrogator, this magazine was the media arm of American intelligence agencies. When “Mr. Rosewater” accused Bahri of being a “media spy,” the reporter asked what that phrase meant. “We don’t have a definition of that at the moment,” he replied. “Let’s work on it together.”

…

Bahari was kept prisoner under Mr. Rosewater’s watch for 118 days, 12 hours and 54 minutes. He never learned his interrogator’s real name, and only saw his face twice. But Bahari didn’t demonize Mr. Rosewater in the November 21, 2009 Classified Secret Service report — sorry, Newsweek cover story — he wrote after his release  “I always regarded the interrogator and the whole regime as ridiculous human beings.” he told me by phone last week.

Review: Jon Stewart’s Rosewater: Laughing Through the Torture

Richard Corliss, Time

11/13/14 11:18 AM ET

You may recall the Iranian citizens’ plangent protests against the “landslide victory” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The story had everything: peaceful masses colliding with the political-religious complex, 21st-century gadgets like Twitter used to defy a medieval regime and the image of a gorgeous martyr in Neda Agha-Soltan. The uprising saturated cable news for a week – until Michael Jackson died. Instantly, like a Pixar dog distracted by a squirrel, the networks forgot about Iran and went all Jacko, all the time.

One of the incidental atrocities of the Islamic Republic that year was its imprisoning of Bahari. Born in Iran, schooled in Canada, based in London and covering the Iranian election for Newsweek, Bahari committed the crime of sitting for a Teheran interview for Jason Jones of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Jones, posing preposterously as an American spy, asked the London-based Bahari, “Are you a terrorist?” Bahari: “No.” Jones, smugly: “That sounds like something a terrorist would say.”

In a location piece at the time, Jones explained, “We’re not making fun [of the Iranians]. We’re kind of being ironic.” In the film, when Bahari is shown the Daily Show piece by his captors, he says, “It’s supposed to be funny,” adding sensibly, “Why would a spy have a TV show?” But irony is something that gets lost in translation from the satirists in a democracy to the enforcers in a theocracy. Recall D.H. Lawrence’s observation that “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.” To Bahari’s interrogator Jabadi (Kim Bodnia), nicknamed Rosewater for the cologne he wears, the straight-faced laughter of Jones and Stewart is the I-know-it-when-I-see-it obscenity of sedition. Pornography is Jabadi’s word for the DVDs of The Sopranos and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema that he finds among Bahari’s effects. And the Daily Show interview surely proves that Bahari is working for “CIA, MI6, Mossad, Newsweek” – as if three spy agencies were indistinguishable from a newsmagazine.

Maziar Bahari, Gael Garcia Bernal, surely you recognize the names by now.  I expect this will get a double segment and an extended if not the whole half hour.  Rosewater opens tomorrow.

Best known for her roles as Mystique and Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer Lawrence is the highest-grossing action heroine of all time.  She’ll be on to talk about the latest installment of The Hunger Games, Mockingjay.

rustymancuso581

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