The Alley of Love and Yellow Jasmines (10 page)

The Pot Lady and Mash Rahim
was successfully staged at the workshop and toured the southern cities of Abadan, Ahvaz, and Isfahan. The play brought more than five thousand southerners to the theaters in nine performances.

AFTER THE PLAY,
I landed my first feature film,
The Chess Game of the Wind
, playing the part of a bondmaid and directed by emerging director Mohammad Reza Aslani.

The Chess Game of the Wind
is an Agatha Christie–like story of a corrupt aristocratic family murdering each other one by one, then finally by my character, a young slave. It was shot at an historic mansion that once belonged to a reputable prime minister of Iran. It was located next to Laleh-Zar, or the “tulip field,” Tehran’s equivalent of Broadway and a major shopping area.

It was during this production that I first met Jaleh (or Zsa Zsa), my dear friend, who would watch me prepare for the Oscars years later. She had just returned from America, where she had spent most of her young life. She was now working with Progressive Iranian Cinema, the film’s production company.

Jaleh had experience working in Hollywood for a short time and followed the same methods, or rules, in producing
The Chess Game of the Wind.
She sent a car to each actor’s house and made sure that every actor’s demands were fulfilled. In fact, she was the one who taught us what Hollywood meant. If you pamper the actors, you get the best results. Jaleh even checked up on us at night. She wanted to make sure we did not party too late so that we would come to work fresh.

I will never forget the night I went to our hairdresser’s birthday party with my costar. It was during the week, and Jaleh had somehow found out about the party and had come to send us home. We felt like teenagers with a curfew.

FOLLOWING MY WORK
on
The Chess Game of the Wind
the director Abbas Kiarostami offered me the lead in his first feature film,
The Report
. He was well known for the short films he had made at the “Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults” (as it would be translated into English). The institute had been founded by Farah, Her Majesty the Queen of Iran. When I broke the news and told the workshop that I had another offer, they told me that if I accepted the film, I could no longer work there because I would not be available to attend on a daily basis.

I left the workshop with a lot of sorrow in my heart. I was scared of letting go and leaving my peers. After all, it had been part of my identity for several years now. I could have stayed there with a guaranteed future, but as Grandma used to say, “Even water gets stagnant, remaining in the same place for too long.”

The future was unclear, but I was excited about it.

ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE
considering Kiarostami’s offer, I decided to take a luxurious bath, adding a couple of fresh jasmine flowers and sea salt. I turned off the light, placing two round cotton balls soaked in rosewater on my eyelids while I sat dreaming, but removed them when the door was opened and Aydin came in looking disheveled. He sat on the white and yellow tiled area, adjacent to the tub, and kept looking at me. He looked lost in the steam.

I asked him if anything was wrong, and he said he had been invited to work at Her Majesty the Queen’s office as the head of the Art and Cultural Department. He was worried what his friends might think of him. When I asked him why his friends’ opinions mattered to him so much, he said that there is no intellectual society in the world that could support their government. I told him that his friends might get upset with him at first but when they realized what he could do for them while holding such an important position they would understand.

The mission of the office of the queen was to preserve Iranian heritage and to promote and support contemporary Iranian arts and artists. A handful of Aydin’s close friends and social acquaintances could benefit from his new position. They were extremely talented artists but not well known or privileged enough to promote their works. Aydin could indeed help.

“Even ideologues have to work within the system to survive. Take the job and help your artist friends,” I said to him.

The look of worry suddenly disappeared from his face. He was smiling, as was I.

Aydin asked me what I thought about Kiarostami’s screenplay. I told him that with all due respect to Kiarostami, the screenplay did not make any sense to me. He asked me what the story was about, and I said, “Nothing.”

He smiled. “
Nothing
is a very important word. Why don’t you read it again and see what this ‘nothing’ is?”

THE STORY WAS
about a couple who were constantly fighting and on the verge of a nasty breakdown, due to their financial problems, even though the leading man was a tax collector.

Suddenly I felt like I had discovered a new world, just like cinema verité. I expected “drama,” as in the movies I had seen previously, with twists and turns and an elongated climax. Kiarostami had instead portrayed a lower-middle-class family whose life lacked excitement and who were at the end of their rope. The real drama was the fact that there was no solution to the dilemma, where nothing can change, no miracles can happen, and no family members would ever step in.

I called Kiarostami the next day and told him I would do it.

They were not going to start shooting for another month, so I decided to go to Paris with Aydin.

Aydin had to stop in Geneva first on business. He was commissioned to buy some Iranian art and antiques that had been smuggled or stolen from Iran throughout centuries and were now being sold at prominent auction houses in Europe.

Aydin loved to shop for me, whether I was traveling with him or not. He sat for hours in French boutiques such as Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Emanuel Ungaro, and others on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. When he returned home, he would dress me up and I would do the catwalk for my girlfriends. They knew he had great taste and only shopped at the top designers.

In Paris together, we were walking down the Champs-Élyseés, window-shopping, and saw a crowd gathered around a pet shop window where gorgeous puppies of all different breeds were sitting and playing. There he was: a classic German shepherd, brown and gold, proudly looking at the adoring crowd. His eyes were affectionate, and he was sitting in a Sphinx position. His ears were arrogantly erect. I could not take my eyes off of him, and he was looking at me, too.

I heard Aydin whispering, “Do you want him?” I could not believe my ears. I cheered and kissed him. Aydin bought him for me and named him Pasha, meaning “sir” in Turkish. Pasha was six months old and already trained. We took him home on Iran Air the next day.

I would walk Pasha for hours in the Royal Public Park close to our house and played vigorously at home. One of our favorite activities was to dance. I’d put his paws on my shoulders, hold him tight, and we’d tango to Albinoni’s
Adagio
. Aydin once said that he would never forget the sight of Pasha and me dancing.

15

The Four Musketeers

I
started working on Kiarostami’s
The Report
in 1976. We shot the movie in a pocket-size house, which was located close to Tehran Airport. In fact, what made the fights between the husband and wife even more intense was the constant sound of jets flying overhead.

Before we knew it, we were on our way to the Moscow Film Festival, where the film won the Critics’ Choice Award and was seen by an international audience. I was finally being congratulated for my work by non-Iranians.

A WEEK AFTER
my return from Moscow I received bad news about
The Report
. The film had been banned under the Shah’s regime due to its premise that a tax collector’s poverty would cause havoc in his family. The notion of displaying poverty was frowned upon. Despite
The Report
’s success with the critics in Moscow, it was not going to be shown in Iran.

But I could not believe it. I had heard about how bad censorship was becoming under SAVAK, which was increasing its power with the Shah, but I had not yet experienced it.

I decided to fight for the film and asked Aydin to get me an appointment (through his connections with the queen) with Mr. Pahlbod, the minister of art and culture, who was also His Majesty’s son-in-law. I assumed he still had power when it came to censorship.

The ministry was located at the top of Baharestan Square. This was the same square that had witnessed many political rallies, demonstrations, and the assassination of Prime Minister Hassan-Ali Mansur, a liberal politician, on January 27, 1965. Mansur was literally a few steps away from the gates of Majlis (parliament) to deliver his first State of the Union speech, when he was shot fatally getting out of his car at Baharestan Square. He later died at a hospital. Mansur was said to have American tendencies in his politics. Four members of Fadayan Islam (martyrs of Islam) were executed in relation to his assassination.

I also have a lot of personal memories of the square. My mother used to take me to a kindergarten located right off of it every day. There was a vast round pool in the center of the square with a huge fountain in the middle of it. The fountain was lit up in different colors that kept changing while the water flowed out into the pool. I also went there with Grandmother Bahar al-Sadat to watch the ebullient festivities while enjoying cream puffs, my favorite pastry, in the hot summer evenings.

The pastry shop that sold the best cream puffs was still there. I decided to buy a couple and take them to the minister. Perhaps I was going to try to bribe him innocently with the delicacies and my charm. My appointment was at two in the afternoon, and I was right on time with my box of cream puffs. The minister’s secretary asked me to wait a couple of minutes and then sent me in. The room was wide, long, and pretty dark. Its walls were covered with black-and-white pictures of the minister with the king and the rest of the cabinet as well as the minister’s diplomas and other assorted decorations. The minister was sitting behind his magnificent desk at the rear of the room next to a large window with half-open blinds.

I walked in and shouted my hello, loudly and awkwardly. But as I took literally my second step toward him, I lost my balance and hit the chair next to his desk. Luckily, I managed to hold on to the box of cream puffs and offered them as soon as I landed near his desk.

I could see he was dying to laugh at me but was also impressed by my courage. After all, I had the audacity to make an appointment with him and complain about censorship in Iran. He listened carefully to my issues and said nothing. At the end he promised that he would personally look into it and do his best to release the film.

The film was never released.

AYDIN WAS CONSTANTLY
traveling in search of Iranian treasures, yet he still managed to exhibit his paintings at the spacious gallery at the Iran-America Society for two weeks. The gallery’s theme during that time was the face of Botticelli. Aydin had several paintings that were interpretations of the master’s. The exhibition was extraordinary and so was the turnout. Art lovers, collectors, connoisseurs, students, along with ordinary people visited. Everyone loved Aydin’s work.

ALTHOUGH
THE REPORT
did not find its way to the silver screen in Iran, I was receiving offers from filmmakers who had managed to see it. One script,
Broken Hearts
, came to me, and I fell in love with the tragic love story of a prostitute and her mentally disordered lover. It was written by the Iranian screenwriter Ali Hatami, who died of cancer in 1996. He was also slated to direct the film and had offered me the role of the prostitute, playing opposite Behrooz Vossoughi, Iran’s superstar actor and the equivalent of a dark-haired Steve McQueen.

Broken Hearts
was shot mostly in a traditional house south of Tehran in the winter. It turned out to be one of the classics of Iranian cinema and garnered me the fame in Iranian films to which I owe my career. I literally gave away two months of my life and focused on portraying this character with the utmost naturalness, actively trying to shed any theatrical mannerisms or clichés.

I LEFT TEHRAN
soon after the shooting was done and went to Rome with Aydin and our best friends, Behnam and his wife, Dokhi. Behnam was a genius. He was a critic, hosted his own TV show on the Iranian national network at the age of twenty-four, and spoke high Farsi and fluent English. He was certainly a man with no patience for mediocrity. He was thin and dark, with an uncanny resemblance to Einstein, including the same wild hairstyle.

Dokhi on the other hand was an introvert and calm at all times. She was an intelligent, petite young woman with an incredible view of the world. She had studied psychology in Iran and France, and at twenty-four was already working part-time at a psychiatric hospital in northern Tehran.