Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (2001)

Imagine Alfred Hitchcock without the ghoulish twinkle -- Hitchcock as a weary schlemiel manning your local butcher counter -- and you'll have an idea of the gloomy, ''life's a shrug'' countenance of Bahman, the death haunted Iranian protagonist of Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine. Played by Bahman Farmanara, the film's writer and director, in a role based largely on himself, he's a once renowned movie director who attempts to jump start his life and career after having been blacklisted from the film industry for 20 years.

A widower mired in a quicksand of loneliness, this is a man so (literally) heartsick that when a cardiologist orders him to quit smoking, he lights up a cigarette, in an act of utterly blasé self destruction, the moment he walks out of the hospital. ''Smell of Camphor'' could almost be a prosaic, black comic variation on Abbas Kiarostami's ''Taste of Cherry,'' with its monosyllabic suicidal antihero. Though the film spares us Kiarostami's paint drying pace, it lacks his meditative lyric gravity. Depression is a fair subject for a movie, but this much moroseness shouldn't come to this little.

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