Leila’s Brothers
Directed by Saeed Roustayi
Running time: 2hrs45 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Somewhere in Tehran, an old man, Heshmat (Saeed Poursamimi), sits smoking. A factory announces that it is closing, and all the workers are to leave without further ceremony, causing a riot. One man flees, changing along the way out of his factory uniform and into street clothes; he’s desperate to avoid conflict.
He is Alireza (Navid Mohammadzadeh) and we’ll shortly see him in a very different context, with his extended family at the hospital where his brother has just had his first son, the fifth child in a family of girls. This pattern is reversed in Alireza’s generation of adult siblings. Alongside Alireza, new father Parvis (Farhad Aslani), Del Boy-esque chancer Manouchehr (Payman Maadi) and amiable lunk Farad (Mohammad Ali Mohammadi) are brothers to a lone female, Leila (Taraneh Alidoosti).
Leila is something of an Elizabeth Bennett figure to the rest of her family, perpetually surrounded as she is by clueless relatives that she must attempt to save from themselves. But this isn’t a film of sonnets and bonnets: the literary references that it calls to mind are the chunkier doorstops of the 1800s: Middlemarch, Great Expectations, The Brothers Karamazov. Characters are vividly drawn, often to the point of being laugh-out-loud funny, and the financial and reputational pressures to which they are all subject are sketched with comic verve and allowed to unspool in ways that are sometimes surprising and sometimes feel utterly inevitable.
I wonder if there was an idea in here at some point in some version of the script about sins of various sorts — each main character seems to wrestle a particular weakness, running the gamut from anger, to avarice, pride, gluttony and so on, although if Alireza can be accused of anything it’s timidity, which is hardly a capital offence.
Despite their manifold and keenly drawn flaws, I rather liked this family. They fight a bit like the adult siblings in the TV series Succession, but while the issues being thrashed out by the billionaire Roy family have life-altering consequences for the millions of people affected by their empire, for Leila and her brothers, we see how tiny tremors in the global financial system affect the personal hopes, dreams and ambitions of the poor schlubs on the sharp end of such man-made disasters. They are treated with humane warmth by director Saeed Roustayi, who deftly shows how their flaws are at least partly the products of the society in which they exist. He is clearly a major talent despite a relatively brief back catalogue.
As the film burns to its conclusion with the measured urgency of the last couple of drags on a cigarette smoked in a moment of unexpressed stress, we see for the first time since the film’s opening, the four small grand-daughters, the next generation, blowing up balloons, ready for a birthday party. I’d forgotten about them until now; they’d been off-screen for two and a half hours. Heshmat sits smoking, just behind them. The film offers no predictions as to what might happen to the next generation of this frustrating, appealing, unlucky family, closing with a semi-colon instead of a full stop.
LEILA’S BROTHERS (2022) Written by Saeed Roustayi | Shot by Hooman Behmanesh
Selected for the Competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival
