Poverty As a Social Issue

There is a relatively clear line separating pennilessness-poverty and mendicancy-panhandling. Begging for alms (or whatever name you choose to call it) is not considered a serious issue. Poverty (or pennilessness, especially as a social phenomenon) is a serious one, however, and in Iran, especially in Tehran, even more so. You may not like to hear it, but it's bound to become even more serious in days or years to come. It is such an important social issue that when in the Post WWII era, filmmakers painted a realistic picture of poverty in their works (with such examples as Umberto D. or The Bicycle Thief) the outcome was a shift in the apparently well-established notion of Realism and it ultimately gave way to Neo-realism.

Is Pennilessness a Social Film?

But where does director {Hamid Nematollah}'s film, Pennilessness, stand here? Nothing. Really nothing. Pennilessness(this film that we see and not the one that we are speaking of or is spoken of) is not interested in the concept of poverty or its social implications. Pennilessness is about an individual who, because he is lacking in something that can be called "impotence" finds himself in a rut called poverty. Virility is, needless to say, something desirable. Without it, you wife may belittle you as your financial situation deteriorates. But when you do have it, you wife will say, "I am starting to like you" and your life will become better as a result. This is the message that Pennilessness delivers to its audience in the last four or five minutes of the film so as not to let them leave the theater empty-handed.

Pennilessness Must be a Social Film

Since I believe that in this day and age you cannot make a film called Pennilessness without looking at your society (along with the fact that the director's first film, Boutique, was to many one the most important social films of the past three decades in Iranian cinema), I cannot disregard a social reading of Pennilessness. This is despite the fact that most of the film takes place indoors and seldom wanders off into the city where poverty finds its real roots. Pennilessness cannot not be a social film. How?

Pennilessness Is a Social Film

Liars, shady companies that are engaged in dubious ventures, addiction, favoritism, a utopia called Dubai, checks without a bank account, the uprooted, rich kids with weird hairdo and tight shirts, boys with nose jobs, air headed husbands shooting off their mouths, loud women, etc. figure in the script of the film; as such, we cannot say that this film is not about society at large. It is a film about an urban-dwelling class, bored stiff and inflated outwardly in today's Tehran, that in the past several years have been able to raise themselves into a different social standing, a different "class." Despite all this, Pennilessness is not a social film. Why?

Pennilessness Is Not a Social Film

I already mentioned one reason for Pennilessness not being a social film: The camera is as impotent as the male protagonist, IRAJ (played by {Bahram Radan}), in that it only whines and is unwilling to do anything to work on resolving his problems. The camera is unwilling to get into the city, which is the context of all social problems; scenes are either internal or when they are set outside they are heavily contracted and void of social markers. Second, because of this impotence, most of the social observations and interactions take place within dialogues (I am really tired of Iranian films being so poor in visual language, relying only on verbal communication. Sometimes I think that a law should be passed for those who aspire to become filmmakers to force them to make at least three silent movies to understand how images can speak). Pennilessness is visually poor. As an inverse example, look at the sequence where a dishonest character like Parviz Afrashteh (played by {Habib Rezai}) talks about the scarcity of a book that he published and we later see a bed made of these very books. But you would be hard put finding other such instances of visuality at work.

Pennilessness Is Not about Poverty

The worst thing about Pennilessness is the treatment of poverty in the film. I will use a sentence that one of the characters of the film mouths ("I am tired of this abstraction called friendship") to say that in Pennilessness we are presented with an abstract notion of poverty. It is enough to look at the main characters of the film, who without even trying as much to understand how poverty can affect their faces, are playing the role of people who are crushed by penury. As audiences we have a hard time believing that these characters are in the grips of Pennilessness simply because in many scenes we are offered a different set of signs that point somewhere else.

Why Is Pennilessness Not about Pennilessness?

Since Hamid Nematolla made Boutique at some point in his career, and since I believe that filmmaking is not something whose power you can easily dismiss, what has happened in Pennilessness may be analyzed in two ways. First hypothesis: Prank. In many sequences I kept thinking that the issue of poverty is a joke in this film and that we are simply supposed to be entertained by the theme. I can prove this by several examples. The last name of Iraj, who is a dress designer, is CHITCHI, and in one of the dialogues we hear Parviz joke: "Versace, Gucci, Chitchi!" More importantly, in another sequence where the wife is about to leave the house in anger, taking the hand of her daughter, GITA, her husband begs: "Take whoever the hell you want with you, but don't take Gita." This sequence made people in the theater laugh their hearts out.

Second hypothesis: Reality. According to this hypothesis, to make a film about the serious issue of poverty, in one of the periods that it has become a major concern for the society, it is not appropriate to make fun of this issue at all. It also true that if you want to find a way to talk about poverty, you need to get away from elitist circles a little, to taste poverty a little, which the director or cast of Pennilessness have obviously been unwilling to do; otherwise, why would a denigrated character in the movie be an altruist who is generous with his money and who everyone in the film is out to take advantage of. Also, I am finding it hard to believe that virility means that someone will sleep all day until his child is taken ill and needs to go to the hospital, by which time he goes and sells all the stuff in the house (probably his wife's property) to feel good and robust again.

I Only Wish Pennilessness Had Been About Pennilessness

Last word: The moving neo-realist images of the 1940s and 50s aside, even {Woody Allen} in his shrewd comedy Take the Money and Run, which make people laugh throughout, offers us a biting and thought-provoking image of poverty. One can use comedy to bring audiences closer to a social tragedy, which can also be very effective because the tragedy of poverty cannot be spoken of without a tinge of comic distance. But Nematollah's Pennilessness, despite the film critics that have approved of it, is not a thought-provoking comedy but a moneymaking sitcom of the kind that we are used to and which takes poverty to be fashionable subject.