Frosty and I hastened down the stairs into the secluded privacy of our basement. She looked at me, her eyes dancing with eagerness and anticipatory excitement, as if to say, "Hurry up! I can't wait a second longer!" Pulse pounding, I turned off the light.

Yes, dear reader, you've guessed it – we were about to watch Bahman Ghobadi's second film, MAROONED IN IRAQ!!

Bahman Ghobadi's first film, A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES, is a masterpiece.  Ghobadi grew up in an impoverished Iranian Kurdish village high in the cold, bleak mountains, a small village where everyone lived in simple one-room stone huts and the only way to eke out a living was to buy small quantities of manufactured goods (dishware, tires, that sort of thing) and smuggle them across the border into Iraq, where they could be sold for a profit. When Ghobadi decided to make a feature-length movie about the hardships of his people, he barely had enough money to buy the film, so he came up with a story that would entail no additional expenses, a simple, realistic, slice-of-life story that takes place in a single isolated location, and as for actors, he recruited local villagers with no acting experience whatsoever to play all the parts, asking them just to be themselves. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes the challenge of having to work under severe restraints can cause genius to flare up and illuminate the truth. This is what happened when Ghobadi created A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES. I haven't dared to take on the challenge of reviewing it, but if I were to do so, I would labor mightily to show why it's a stone-cold six on the Watson Scale.

You will understand then why Frosty and I had worked ourselves up into a fever pitch of excitement. It's my sad duty to report that MAROONED IN IRAQ left us sorely disappointed. Success has spoiled Bahman Ghobadi. Having money has freed him to create a more complicated story, but also one that all too frequently feels contrived, implausible, and unrealistic. Worse yet, money has allowed him to hire bad professional actors who ham it up relentlessly.

Part of the problem comes from Ghobadi's ambitious intent. He wanted to set a warm humanistic comedy against the tragic backdrop of Saddam Hussein's genocidal slaughter of Iraq's Kurds. The tonal complexity of such an endeavor is so delicate and tricky that only a genius can pull it off. In my opinion (many disagree), Chaplin succeeded when he made THE GREAT DICTATOR, but Roberto Benigni flopped with LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.

Ghobadi doesn't exactly flop in MAROONED. He has too much talent. His cinematography and editing are powerful. His timing is perfect when he alternates noise (the stridency of angry voices, the whine of malfunctioning engines, the screech of bombers flying overhead) with sudden silence or the sweet surprise of music. (The three main characters, an old man and his two middle-aged sons, are searching for wives in Iraq, but they also happen to be musicians, so they make themselves welcome by performing for refugees and orphans, who respond with much clapping and dancing.) 

I admire Ghobadi's humanistic themes. He hates war. He hates the male arrogance and greed and lust for power that cause war. He honors the strength and wisdom of women.  During the course of their adventure, all three of our clownishly macho male musicians are forced to change their attitude toward women. Gradually, through women teachers, they learn that helping those who have the least is the greatest good, that performing acts of selfless love will make them happy.

But the contrived plot and the painfully histrionic acting clash – sometimes grotesquely – with the good parts of MAROONED, diminishing the movie's dramatic effect. As they wander through Iraq, the old man and his sons bicker in loud voices like children, each blaming the other two for various setbacks and predicaments, and all three arguing repetitiously about what to do next. After a while, I began to get a strong feeling of recognition. Was it just deja vu, or was I actually seeing something I had seen before, long ago, in the distant past of my childhood? Then it hit me. Abbott and Costello had been reincarnated as Kurds, with Bud playing the father and Lou playing the two sons!

One can only hope that Ghobadi invests heavily in the Iranian stock market, loses everything, and is forced to make his third flick on a shoestring budget.