The film: Tatami, 2023. Director: Guy Nattiv, Tsar Amir Ebrahimi. Cast: Arienne Mandi, Czar Amir Ebrahimi. Genre: thriller, sports. Duration: 105 minutes. Where we saw it: at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.
Plot: Leila and her coach Maryam reach Tbilisi, where the Judo World Championships are about to be held. Halfway through the championships, the two receive an ultimatum from the Islamic Republic of Iran to feign injury and withdraw from the competition.
Sport is never just about athletics. It’s not just physical effort and sweat. It’s never just a matter to be solved in the rectangle of the football field or in the four walls of a gym. Sport moves values and moves feelings. Sport is politics, because teams and athletes are social and identity amplifiers, bearers of ideals. Sometimes vulgar, violent and to be eradicated – just look at many ultras football movements, appendages of tribal and criminal interests. Sometimes noble, broad and an expression of the needs of a generation, a people, a nation. In this Tatami reviewa film in competition in the Horizons section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival directed by Guy Nattiv and Czar Amir Ebrahimi, we will see how personal ambition and the shadows of a country collide in the square of the carpet where the protagonist judoka struggles on fire.
The texture of Tatami
Leila (Arienne Mandi) and her coach Maryam (Ebrahimi herself) reach Tbilisi, where the Judo World Cup is about to be held. Halfway through the championships, the two receive an ultimatum from the Islamic Republic of Iran, which orders Leila to fake an injury and withdraw to avoid meeting an Israeli judoka in one of the following matches and therefore being branded a traitor to the state.
With her freedom and that of her family at stake, kept under constant threat by agents of the regime, Leila is faced with an impossible choice: to obey the orders that come from the top of the state, as her coach Maryam begs her to do. , or keep fighting for the gold.
Not an easy operation
Iran has been at the center of international gaze for some time. A country where personal and individual freedoms are increasingly limited, squeezed in a vice in which it is mainly women who pay the price, obliged, among other things, to observe strict rules of dress and decorum. Only a few months ago, the popular mobilization – especially among the youth – attempted to give a jolt to the fundamentalist roots of the regime, forced to deal with hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets. A landslide harshly repressed in blood, which nevertheless managed to turn the spotlight on the state of things in Iran and to widen a minimum, but who knows for how long, the police’s hard shirts on respect for morals.
It is necessary to start from this small overview to remember that making a film in Iran or about Iran is not a matter of course. Iranian filmmakers who have known their country’s prisons up close, such as Jafar Panahi, Mohammad Rasoulof or Saeed Roustayi, are well aware of this. So already from its premise Tatami is not a film like the others. Because above all it is the first film co-directed by an Israeli director and an Iranian director, a cultural bridge that already in its intentions shows a clear and evident stance.
It’s not a film like the others because at the center of its story is a woman, a fighter by nature and by profession, who claims the right to compete by shouting at the deaf ideological interests of her country who try to prevent her from doing so. It is not a film like the others because it succeeds in an enterprise that very few succeed, namely that of amalgamating (the screenplay is by Nattiv together with Elham Erfani) in a homogeneous way the conceptual and political scope without renouncing to become a compelling work , rhythmic, taut like a violin string.
A smart statement
Tatami is in fact a manifesto signed in blood, but it is also a thriller, as well as a full-fledged sports film. And it is incredible how all these souls manage to reconcile with this great harmony, to leave Leila in suspense during every match that she fights compressed in 4:3 in black and white which for once is an aesthetic choice, but not cumbersome. Between one meeting and another that marks the climb to the podium, the drama of threats and interference then takes place, where the frustration of a truly excellent Mandi collides with the suffering and terrified eyes of Ebrahimi, in a whirlwind where it is really difficult to see a single and absolute reason.
And one of the most interesting and successful aspects of Tatami is also the fact of seeing him think about and through the female body, reconfigured as a true and proper means of expression, a reappropriated tool through which to launch a clear and liberating statement in one of the final moments of the film. A remarkable work, which makes a virtue of its expressive urgencies, calibrated with great intelligence and great transport.
The review in brief
8.0 Remarkable
Tatami is a film that intelligently and coherently manages to reconcile its many souls. A work of great political and social urgency, which however does not give up being a tense sports thriller as well.
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2023-09-04 17:50:02
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