Doroshkechi (Nosrat Karimi, 1971)

The new digital copy of Doroshkechi that world-premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2022 (for which this note was composed) is now (September 12, 16:00) playing at Forum des Images in Paris. I shall be introducing the Parisian screening of the film. – EK

Doroshkechi [The Carriage Driver] (Iran, 1971, black & white, 115 min)

Writer and Director: Nosrat Karimi

Writer: Nosrat Karimi. Cinematographer: Houshang Baharlou. Editing: Sirus Jarrahzadeh. Music: Mojtaba Mirzadeh. Cast: Nosrat Karimi (Gholamali), Shahla Riahi (Zinat Sadat), Masoud Asadollahi (Morteza), Arghavan (Pouri), Babak Karimi (Hassan), Ezattollah Navid, Diana. Producer: Manouchehr Sadeghpour. Scanned in 5K and digitally cleaned in 4K by CNC.

When the marriage of young lovers Morteza and Pouri becomes subject to Morteza approving the marriage of his recently widowed mother to Pouri’s father, a set of complications arise. Nosrat Karimi’s Doroshkechi (1971) about ‘marriage Iranian style’, which amounts to a Commedia all’iraniana, is a major rediscovery. It exemplifies a popular yet finely crafted type of Iranian cinema, access to which has been banned since the 1979 revolution. Karimi, who had done some apprenticeship work with Vittorio De Sica and had a huge love for Italian cinema (a year earlier he wrote a script based on Cops and Robbers for another director), turned a real-life story into an intricate comedy. Doroshkechi shows a masterful use of elements from pink neorealism, filmfarsi (Iranian popular cinema) as well as Czechoslovakian cinema; the latter, thanks to Karimi’s education in Prague, informing a dream sequence and totally surprising animation elements in the film.

The authenticity and warmth of the acting throughout creates the sense of a real working-class milieu. The quality of the performances is surprising too since, with the exception of the veteran Shahla Riahi (credited as being the first female director in the history of Iranian cinema, for her 1956 film Marjan), all the leading actors were new to the medium – including Karimi and his son Babak (who later appeared in films by Abbas Kiarostami and Asghar Farhadi).

Karimi offers a sharp, though good-hearted, critique of Iranian society – using its prejudices and biases regarding namus (the virtue of the female members of the family) as a basis for comedy, and poking fun at rituals such as burials, marriage and circumcision ceremonies. He depicts women as the more sensible, realist and balanced of the sexes. Karimi continued to question the traditional foundations of Iranian life in two extremely controversial sex comedies, Triple Bed and Mohallel – the second of which nearly resulted in a fatwa – but never with the same success. Doroshkechi remains not only his best film but also one of the finest comedies in the history of Iranian cinema.

Ehsan Khoshbakht