A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Half an hour into the film, I began to feel off. It started with a wave of nausea. I was worried that I might have to throw up, but then the nausea was first complemented and then supplanted by something else: tunnel vision. My field of vision began to fade around the edges, becoming more and more narrow. I tried to focus on something other than the screen, but by then it was too late. The sounds I was hearing became muffled. Next thing, though I still registered the low, muted noises of the film, I felt I was somewhere else, somewhere far away.

I don’t know how long I was in this state, but eventually I came to, as my wife, obviously worried, was trying to get a response from me. I felt disoriented for a few seconds, but then I remembered where I was – at a cinema, in a soft seat, having lost consciousness for what might have been seconds or minutes. I wasn’t entirely fine: my body still felt off somehow, and I began to sweat like someone had opened a faucet. Nonetheless, at first I naively thought I might get back into the film that was playing on the screen, but I did feel quite shaken. Also, my wife wouldn’t have it, so we left the cinema. Eventually we ended up at the emergency room, just to make sure that nothing was seriously wrong, but after waiting there for 5½ hours we went home, having been triaged but not having seen a doctor. Obviously they didn’t think there was much to worry about, so why should I? I did see a doctor the next day, and he confirmed what I’d come to suspect: most likely I’d had what the professionals call a “vasovagal syncope” – or, in layman’s terms, I’d fainted.

What was it that laid me out like that? We hadn’t gone to see a particularly gruesome movie in the body horror genre, nor was it a Saving Private Ryan-alike with body parts flying every which way. No, it was Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a political drama from Iran set during the Mahsa Amini protests. The scene during which it happened wasn’t gratuitous, but it was intense: at a demonstration against the regime’s laws making the wearing of a hijab compulsory for women, a young student called Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi) has been shot in the face, and Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), the mother of two of her friends, carefully removes, one by one, the pellets embedded in her face with a pincer. There is blood, the wound looks painful, and you see enough of the damage done to the young woman’s face, but Rasoulof and his cinematographer Pooyan Aghababaei do not revel in gore.

In the film, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), Najmeh’s daughters, witness this impromptu act of first aid. Their faces reflect the horror of the situation as much as Sadaf’s swollen, bloody face does. They want to look away – but they do not. They make themselves look at what the regime and its willing helpers have wrought. They look at the damage to Sadaf’s face, at the very real evidence left there by the world they live in.

In the scene, I saw the two young women looking at something they wished they didn’t have to see, and I saw the film refusing to look away, so I too wanted to keep looking. Sadly, I proved not to be up to it: in hindsight, it would have been better for me to limit how much of the scene I was taking in. (At this point, I also know one or two tricks that could help me reduce the chances of fainting – thanks, Google!)

I remember reading about films that were advertised by referring to all the people who fainted or became sick: from Tod Browning’s Freaks to The Exorcist, from The Last House on the Left to Raw. I always thought that this was a cheap marketing gimmick with little to no basis in truth. I know better now, though Rasoulof’s film is unlikely to be advertised in these terms anyway – “Watch this film – a middle-aged guy in Switzerland fainted half an hour into it!” Even though I’ve only seen about a third of The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I can safely say that, judging from its beginning, it is a powerful film – and one that challenges you not to look away. Though perhaps don’t take this too literally: you can not look away while still keeping your eyes off the screen, if that helps. It’s what I am planning to do when I get around to seeing the whole of The Seed of the Sacred Fig – which I hope will be before long.