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 blase 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. C+

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