
Navid Mohammadzadeh and Taraneh Alidoosti in Leila’s Brothers (2022)
Synopsis
In the opening montage we’re introduced to the three opposing cultural conversations that underlie this intensely emotional drama of a modern-day Iranian family in crisis.
Alireza Jourablou (Navid Mohammadzadeh) is being chased out of the factory where he’s been working the past year. The laborers haven’t been paid but the corrupt owners say they will be “soon.” He scrambles desperately to escape the chaos as rioting breaks out around him.
Meanwhile, his father Esmail (Saeed Poursamimi) is attending a gathering of male members of the expansive Jourablou clan, where the naming of a new family patriarch is at stake. Though he professes to be unworthy, you can see he ardently wants it. But his advances are rebuffed, and he is shut out of the meeting.
And then there’s Leila Jourablou (Taraneh Alidoosti), who is undergoing medical treatment for what appears to be back pain. As the entire family gathers again at home, we see Leila is clearly the one who speaks forcefully during a confrontation with Esmail over the naming of a grandson. The family meeting is boisterous; the recriminations fly.
It is Leila’s income that supports the family. Like out-of-work Alireza, her other brothers have little to contribute: one with a large family works for tips at a restroom in a shopping mall, another dabbles in questionable business deals, and yet another appears to have little motivation to do anything besides body building.
But Leila proposes an idea to lift them out of poverty. They should take advantage of an opportunity to buy a shop space in that mall so her brothers can finally have meaningful jobs. All the siblings combined can’t begin to scrape together enough money for the purchase. Then they learn their father has 40 gold coins that he intends to provide as a gift at a Jourablou family wedding, which will be what it takes to thrust him into the role of clan patriarch. Or … it would be enough to secure the shop.
The ensuing family conflagration can be seen as three windows into current day Iran. Father Esmail is fully and deeply devoted to tradition and to taking his deserved role of respect atop the male-dominated hierarchy of his clan. Leila steadfastly pushes her brothers to break free and to take control of their future. And stuck in the middle is brother Alireza, who, though he is clearly the most responsible and even-headed of the brothers, would rather just let things ride, hoping that if they wait long enough things will somehow work out.
See It
Writer/Director Saeed Roustayi does a masterful job of eavesdropping on this family in crisis. It has a documentary feel, with claustrophobic settings in the family home, offices, and meeting places. The camera is always perfectly positioned to catch each character’s expression, revealing – indeed betraying – the emotions that are writhing inside them. As the family’s plight spins ever more out of control, the pacing is nearly flawless, except for a final reveal that feels as if it comes out of nowhere.
The acting is uniformly authentic and calibrated to the individual roles. In particular, Poursamimi is remarkable as the father who cares more for status within his clan than he does for his children’s future, willing to ignore signs he’s being taken advantage of to gain broader respect. His stares of rejection, his tone of contempt, make us feel like the documentarian’s camera is fixed on a real person rather than an actor. Likewise, Mohammadzadeh is completely convincing as the facilitating son who tries futilely to balance respect and love for his father with some sense of duty to his sister and brothers.
But it is Alidoosti as Leila who is the beating heart of both the family and the movie. In her first meeting with Alireza, as she pleads with him to step up and help convince the family to buy the shop, the desperation in her voice tears at you. She is 40, unmarried, in pain, and has nothing to look forward to in life if she can’t convince him to spur his unambitious brothers to step up. As events unravel around her, you viscerally feel her growing sense of weariness and outrage.
It is gut-wrenching to see how distrust, deceit, manipulation, and betrayal – aggravated by external political and economic forces – tears the family apart as they grapple with their alternatives: to stick with tradition, break free, or do just enough to get by and hope for the best. Those of us fortunate enough to live in comfortable circumstances in a stable environment might be tempted to think it’s easy to decide which is “right.”
But we are not, as the Jourablou family is, laboring under the weight of poverty, of centuries-old cultural traditions, of endemic corruption, of bureaucratic ineptness, and of external forces that they’ve not been equipped to fully appreciate until they crash down upon them. When Alireza apologizes to Leila for his weakness, her response illuminates the predicament of an entire underclass: “You were taught what to think and not how to think.” Instead of wondering why everyone was not agreeing on the ”right” path, shouldn’t we instead be wondering: What have they done to deserve this fate, forced to choose in order to simply lead a decent life?
Do not look to Leila, or her brothers, for answers as to who is to blame – or whether indeed anyone is to blame. In the final and jarringly beautiful scene of simultaneous joy and sadness, the camera spins around from Alireza to Leila. Her expression … is it relief, wonder, comprehension, sorrow? Is it all those? Or nothing? It will linger with you long after the screen goes dark.
What to make of that ending? For myself, I think Writer/Director Roustayi is slipping in a message of hope for the future, if poor families like Leila's can shrug off the weight of tradition. The fake snow (or something like it) provides a lovely veil through which to observe this jarring contrast of events at the birthday party. We come to understand that Alireza, stricken with grief, did indeed have a deep and genuine love for his father. He tries to bring himself to dance with the girls, but he just can’t do it; he will need time to heal.
Meanwhile the young girls, perhaps representing an innocent yet hopeful new generation of leaders, are dancing with abandon, oblivious to the passing of the older generation.
And there is Leila, who acted rashly and who naively put too much faith in her brothers; yet, she was the catalyst of the change taking shape around her. She appreciates the pain she has brought on Alireza and her family, but we hope in that final, hard-to-decode expression, she glimpses a brighter way forward.