SECRET BALLOT (Raye makhfi)
Rating out of 4 stars: 2.5 Reviewed by Harvey Karten Sony Pictures Classics Director: Babak Payami Writer: Babak Payami Cast: Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Ab, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii, Gholbahar Janghali Screened at: Loews, NYC, 5/23/02
In America, where democracy is presumably as alive as it is anywhere else in the world, only forty percent of eligible citizens vote in a presidential election. Some local primaries are lucky to bring out ten percent of the citizenry. Why so? Probably because many of us do not think there's a difference between tweedledum and tweedledee though you'd have a difficult time convincing anyone with a degree of sophistication that George W. Bush and Al Gore would think alike on abortion, social security, and the environment.
By way of comparison, in Iran, which is considered by the U.S. administration to be more a part of the axis of evil than a Jeffersonian democracy, there is still some hope in that a so- called moderate, Khatami, was overwhelmingly elected as a blow to the reigning ayatollahs. But film director Babak Payami, in his "Secret Ballot" ("Raye makhfi" in that country's Farsi language), hones in on an election that's about as local you can get: that taking place on the remote, desert-like island of Kish whose population appears to be in the vicinity of 97 and some of them are foreigners to boot. Given that none of the ten candidates for the local office seems to live on the island, that no one there appears to have even a radio, and that so few people know how to read that the absence of a single campaign poster is no drawback, what's the point of free choice? That's just what Payami as satirist makes throughout the work's 105 minutes but he has a number of universal themes to check off in this unusual bit of celluloid which is about as different from a Hollywood blockbuster as the island of Kish is from Grand Central Terminal.
Two soldiers are guarding the island against smugglers. While one sleeps, another (Cyrus Ab) stands, gun strapped to his shoulder, awaiting the early morning arrival of the elections agent who turns out to the soldier's surprise to be a woman (Nassim Abdi). The soldier is grudging and hostile to this new, outside arrival from "the city," reluctant to drive her around the island or even to take orders from her. As they make like a road-and-buddy movie, their relationship predictably changes from one of indifference bordering on antipathy to a warmer, if not entirely swinging association.
Since her orders tell her that the people will not come to the polls, the polls have to go to them, and as the unnamed soldier and woman jeep about the sparsely populated place her in the back seat at first until (wow) she shifts to his side they run into characters as eccentric and blase as any from New York City, from the guy who supplies electricity through his sun reflector to a vendor who will show his ID and vote only if she'd buy something from him.
While the soldier and the girl represent the two people none professional actors, by the way whose evolution is at the forefront of our interest, Payami wants us to see that a) communication is difficult (the Iranian take on that universal theme); b) guns and ballots are the two principal ways by which change is usually effected; c) the whole situation is absurd anyway since nobody knows any of the candidates and despite the woman's entreaties nothing is going to change in the lives of the islanders; d) the elections official and the soldier are stand- ins for the conflict in Iran between the liberal-idealist and the stoical conservative; e) people, principally the women of Iran, are inhibited from change not only by societal restrictions but from their own internalization of its mores.
While Payami cites Mohsen Makhbalhof as his model, presumably for that Iranian filmmaker's emphasis on the sardonic, the surreal, and the absurd, he appears to be of a kind with the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett who, in "Waiting for Godot" holds that no matter how much we might want real change, we're stuck, largely because of our own resistance and inertia.
The film is a challenge. The pace is glacial, the camera remains stationary for the most part, the actors are not professional, there were no rehearsals, and long shots predominate all making for stasis, which does not go over too well with a Western audience. We're facing one of the central ironies of literature and film: how do you show a people's ennui without enervating the audience? While "Secret Ballot" received numerous awards at various festivals in Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, London, Sao Paolo and Valladolid, this is a tough sell even for an American art-house crowd, but Payami's heart is in the right place. He manages in this "G"-rated work to avoid stirring up the erratic and unpredictable censors, and he encourages those of us who live in urban areas like New York rather than on desert islands like Kish to be a little happier with our choice of environment.
Rated G. Running time: 105 minutes. (C) 2002 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
========== X-RAMR-ID: 31897 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 315247 X-RT-TitleID: 10001103 X-RT-SourceID: 570 X-RT-AuthorID: 1123 X-RT-RatingText: 2.5/4
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