Review: A Hero Is a Diamond-Hard Reflection on Questions of Heroism and Truth

Asghar Farhadi’s film slyly reveals itself to be more than a political parable about the cascading injustices of the debtor’s prison.

A Hero
Photo: Amazon Studios

Debtor’s prison traps inmates in a nightmarish paradox, as locking people up for accruing debt only makes it harder for them to earn the money that will allow them to pay it off, breeding further desperation and abjectness. In Iran, as it comes to play out in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, any amount of leniency granted to imprisoned debtors depends on the personal whim of their creditors: If the latter wants those who owe them money to stay in prison until they conjure the full amount out of thin air, then that’s the way it is.

Such is the situation faced by the hapless Rahim (Amir Jadidi) in Farhadi’s film. His creditor is his ex-brother-in-law, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), who loaned him a healthy lump of cash to pay off loan sharks and now bears him a deep grudge. Bahram refuses to assent to letting Rahim out of prison, even after being offered a sizeable down payment and the promise of monthly remittances once Rahim gets a job on the outside. The down payment would come from the hawking of some gold coins that Rahim and his secret girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), find in a purse on the street while Rahim is on a two-day release.

Discovering both that the coins aren’t worth as much as they’d hoped and that Bahram remains intransigent on the issue of his three-year-old loan, the couple decides instead to try to find the woman who’s lost the bag. When the prison administration catches wind of Bahram’s effort to return the gold coins, they see an opportunity for a public relations coup: the imprisoned debtor with a heart of gold. From there, things slowly get complicated, as Farhadi draws out the consequences of the truth-tweaking that comes with stories told by tendential narrators, and it eventually becomes difficult to tell where, precisely, our sympathies should lie. Rahim makes a number of choices that will later be scrutinized by the authorities—and, by extension, the audience—as they try to determine whether he is, as the prison and a prisoners’ charity are eager to make him out to be, a hero.

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Of course, Farhadi’s intent would seem to be to take apart the very notion of a hero. The film opens with Rahim meeting his sister’s husband, Hossein (Alireza Jahandideh), at the tomb of Xerxes I, a beloved king of ancient Persia, where the man is a builder on a maintenance project. That heroes’ images need to be maintained by teams constitutes one of the film’s fundamental observations, with its later emphasis on the way news reports and social media seize on small distortions of Rahim’s story that begin to accumulate. And Rahim’s ascent and descent of the scaffolding abutting the tomb is one of the few almost purely symbolic moments in A Hero, predicting his later rise and fall as a social media darling.

The question of heroism, though, is superseded by questions of truth and its social value writ large. As Rahim tries to escape the encirclement of his doubters, spurred forward by Bahram, he begins adopting the storytelling strategies of the prison-charity complex for whom he’s become a golden child, in a bid to attain his freedom and redeem his and Farkhondeh’s future. Which lies are justified, what motivations compel them, and how far they should be carried through are the ethical concerns that Farhadi illustrates with a precise building up of tension.

In some respects, things are a bit too precisely calculated, as the resolution of this tension will involve a contrived ethical awakening centered around Rahim’s preadolescent son, who has a severe speech impediment. Throughout, Farhadi’s use of the son’s disability to score extra pathos points rankles more than a little bit. While A Hero is clearly intended as a parable about issues that extend beyond the immediate lives of its characters, no other character in the film the feels so much like a mere function. Indeed, a crucial component of A Hero consists of undermining our initial perception of the stern, unforgiving Bahram as fulfilling a purely villainous function, and of the victimized Rahim as straightforwardly innocent.

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It’s the alternating of sympathies that results from almost imperceptible shifts in Farhadi’s emphasis in a given scene—like one in which Rahim encounters Bahram by happenstance at an outdoor market—that lends the film its emotional and ethical ballast. In such moments, A Hero reveals that it’s more than a political parable about the cascading injustices of the debtor’s prison. It’s also a demonstrative examination of the way our raising of heroes onto social media pedestals diminishes the messy, sometimes impenetrable truth of human lives.

Score: 
 Cast: Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sarina Farhadi, Fereshteh Sadrorafaii, Sahar Goldust, Maryam Shahdaei, Alireza Jahandideh, Ehsan Goodarzi  Director: Asghar Farhadi  Screenwriter: Asghar Farhadi  Distributor: Amazon Studios  Running Time: 127 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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