Anthony Lane reviews Asghar Farhadi’s “A Hero” and George Clooney’s “The Tender Bar.”
The hero of “A Hero,” the new film from Asghar Farhadi, is a sign painter and calligrapher named Rahim . As the story begins, he leaves prison and is driven up the wall. To be precise, up a cliff of pale rock, rich in elaborate carvings, northeast of the Iranian city of Shiraz. The cliff is the home of a necropolis, Naqsh-e Rostam, and Rahim finds it covered in scaffolding; climbing high, he greets his brother-in-law, the rotund and genial Hossein , who is working at the site.
The salient event in “A Hero” occurs before the start of the action. Farkhondeh, we learn, has stumbled on a bag of gold coins beside a bus stop. Gold! The answer to the prayers of the wretched! As on the necropolis, and in the Dickensian idea of being jailed for debt, the modern is interfused with the bygone.
By a useful coincidence, “A Hero” arrives in cinemas in the wake of Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth.” Watch one after the other and you may decide, as I did, that “A Hero” is the more Shakespearean of the two. Coen’s film is powerful but hermetic, sealed off within its stylized designs, whereas Farhadi reaches back to “The Merchant of Venice” and pulls the play’s impassioned arguments into the melee of the here and now.
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