Review: Rosewater

There are currently hundreds of journalists and thousands of blogger/activists imprisoned around the world for the crime of bearing witness. One such journalist, London-based Iranian Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal), spent 118 days in solitary confinement and subjected to interrogations, beatings, and threats to his mother and pregnant wife - a misfortune Bahari documented in Then They Came for Me, the basis for Jon Stewart's directorial debut, Rosewater.

The marriage between man and material is unsurprising given Stewart's day job as The Daily Show host and satirist, but while the overall intent is to tell Bahari's story - and, by extension, the story of all journalists who have shared the same experience - and offer a less generalised, more nuanced view of Iran, Rosewater is also Stewart's self-confessed atonement for The Daily Show's accidental part in Bahari's imprisonment. The film takes place in 2009, during the run-up to the Iranian presidential election, which Bahari had been tasked to cover for Newsweek. Though there was a groundswell of support for opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, it was incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was declared the winner by a landslide. Reports of vote rigging triggered mass protests and demonstrations; the government warned its citizens that anyone taking to the streets will be held accountable for the resulting violence and bloodshed.

Bahari had been an observer up until this point, interviewing Alireza Akbar, Ahmadinejad's student organiser, as well as the educated twentysomethings who support Mousavi's call for reform. He's even sat down for an interview with Jason Jones, The Daily Show's Senior Espionage Correspondent, who asks why Iran is such a terrifying place and if he's a terrorist. It's all in good fun and Bahari is very much in on the joke. The Iranian secret police, however, are not and when he's taken from his mother's home and thrown into Evin Prison, they accuse him not for filming the troops firing at protestors but rather for being a spy.

Rosewater evolves into a two-hander as Bahari is taken out of solitary confinement for sessions with his "specialist," nicknamed "Rosewater" for the scent he bears. Kim Bodnia essays the role with appropriate menace, but also with a slight dimness that marks him as someone who can do his job with brutishness rather than worldly intellect (he declares Bahari's DVDs of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema and The Sopranos as "porno"). Bahari regales Rosewater with false tales of visiting special massage parlors as explanations for all the traveling he's done, but such moments of levity are few and far between. For the most part, the audience is trapped in Bahari's Kafkaesque nightmare as he journeys from the confines of his cell to the confines of the interrogation room.

Bernal delivers a performance remarkable for its quiet and restraint. He conveys Bahari's outrage as well as his increasing self-doubt. Stewart utilises the fairly hoary trope of having Bahari conduct conversations with his dead father and sister, but Bernal makes it work. Bahari resists succumbing to the easy path because both his father and sister were also imprisoned and they fought the good fight - so why can't he? Yet every struggle is different, every individual does not have the same amount of wherewithal, and Bahari endeavours to maintain hope against the seeming hopelessness of his situation.

Rosewater

Directed by: Jon Stewart

Written by: Jon Stewart; adapted from Then They Came for Me, by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy

Starring: Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Dimitri Leonidas, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Claire Foy, Arian Moayed, Golshifteh Farahani, Amir El-Masry