Bahman Farmanara – Booye kafoor, atre yas AKA Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine (2000)
Death surrounds Bahman, a director who hasn’t made a film in 24 years (he can’t get past the censors). He’s working on a documentary, for Japanese TV, on Iranian burial practices. On the anniversary of his wife’s death, a hitchhiker tells him a story of spousal abuse and infant mortality, he discovers that someone has been buried in his plot next to his wife, and he needs the help of his attorney, a well-connected fixer. He dreams of death, even as he investigates it for his film. His niece’s husband, a well-known writer, fails to return home; he searches hospitals for an unclaimed body. His heart disease is flaring up. Is he prepared for death? Is that all that’s left?
Review by nunculus @IMDb:
This extraordinarily bizarre film is a triumph of the crushingly personal. Bahman Farmanara, an Iranian filmmaker thwarted in his attempts to make movies for twenty-two years, made his comeback with this autobiographical fragment that literally defies all genre rules–it falls between every imaginable classification stool. Its sole resemblance to other, more celebrated films of the “Iranian New Wave” is in its acute meta-ness. Farmanara, playing himself in the most pained self-portrait of a director since Lucio Fulci’s CAT IN THE BRAIN, finally gets a project past the Iranian censors: a documentary for Japanese TV on Iranian burial rituals. In what at first seems either like a ripoff of Woody Allen, or a parody of TASTE OF CHERRY, Farmanara uses this morbid premise as an excuse to rehearse his own death and burial. What springs from this neurosis is neither funny, exactly, nor poignant. It dances to the beat of its own drummer, as elusive and smokelike in tone as a short story by Bruno Schulz or isaac Babel. One cannot say that Farmanara has shed all the rust of those twenty-two years; or, frankly, that his phlegmatic performance–he looks like Harold Bloom feeling the weight of world literature on his shoulders–works. But as an exemplar of making movies as the voicing of individual feelings and beliefs, SMELL OF CAMPHOR goes to the head of the class.
Smell.of.Camphor.Fragrance.of.Jasmine.2000.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 28 min
Size: 1.24 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 700x480 ~> 828x480
Aspect ratio: 1.727
Frame rate: 25.000 fps
Bit rate: 1 800 kb/s
BPP: 0.214
Audio
#1: Persian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
Language(s):Persian
Subtitles:English
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