A Few Days of Respite

“A Few Days of Respite” follows a gay Iranian couple fleeing persecution in Iran where homosexuality is punishable by death to search for the freedom to live their lives openly. The film aspires to be a love story and also a political story and fails miserably to achieve either one of those goals.

Here’s the plot. Mohsen (the older man) and Hassan (the younger man) have fled Iran where their relationship could ultimately mean a death sentence. They have been dropped in a forested area along the Italian/French border. Their goal is to eventually make their way to Paris. While traveling on a train, Mohsen meets Yolande, a somewhat older French widow. He helps her with her luggage and accompanies her on the train ride. Unaware that he is traveling with Hassan, Yolande offers Mohsen a job painting her apartment. After arriving in the village, the men get a hotel room together and Mohsen decides to take the job to earn some cash before they move on to Paris. The painting job leads to lunch, then to a bed for the night, and then ultimately an offer of marriage.

This film feels false at every level. A very poor script and one dimensional performances by the actors, the film is simply boring and pretentious. This is a film that attempts for importance and instead achieves artificiality. The blame for this failure rests almost solely on the shoulders of Amor Hakkar, the writer, director, and lead actor.

There is nothing to indicate that these men are actually in love which should be the heart and soul of the film. After all, the catalyst for the story is that Mohsen and Hassan are so in love that they feel they can’t hide it anymore and they must flee Iran. There isn’t even a hint that the two men are romantically involved even when they are alone together in the hotel. They barely even speak to each other. Their greatest intimacy is a scene where Mohsen steps out of the shower in front of Hassan and Hassan places his hand on Mohsen’s shoulder. The film doesn’t need to be more explicit, but it does need to provide some sort of evidence that these men are in love. Even at the start of the film Hassan asks Mohsen if he would have waited for him if he had been late only to hear Mohsen’s answer that he would have left without him. Another filmmaker would have celebrated the new freedom the men were experiencing with some sort of physical interaction. Even the title of the film suggests that the men have an opportunity, even if it is brief, to be themselves. Then to confound the viewer and make the plot even more ridiculous, Mohsen actually sleeps with Yolande while Hassan is upstairs in the attic where he can hear what is taking place. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the filmmaker was interested in telling what he believed to be a politically relevant and also politically correct story while himself being unwilling to actually depict a real relationship between two men in love at the risk of appearing to be a homosexual himself. Amor Hakkar never captures what it means to be in a relationship.

The film also introduces story points that are left unresolved and ignores obvious lapses in logic. During the Q&A following the screening, Hakkar made matters worse when he deflected answering questions from the audience asking him about some of these gaps. His responses were patronizing and disclosed that he himself wasn’t quite sure where he was going with the story at times.

The superficiality of the film was underscored at the end of the film when a note tells the viewer what happens to Mohsen and Hassan. Rather than evoking emotion toward the characters, this note made me angry at the filmmaker. I felt that Hakkar was simply exploiting the characters for a political purpose. While that purpose may seem noble, this hollow film does nothing but belittle the cause.

The only compliment I have for this film is that the technical aspects of the film are adequate – though undistinguished.