Day Break Hamid Rahmanian Iran 2004
Co-writer-director Hamid Rahmanian’s debut feature skilfully illustrates the tortured mental state of a murder convict awaiting his final sentence; however, the film has serious flaws of story and script.
According to Iran’s Islamic law, the victim’s family have the power to ‘forgive or revenge’ the criminal. He does not know his fate until the last minute, when he stands upon the gallows and the victim’s relatives decide their compensation - his money or his life. Day Break follows the suffering convict Mansour, as the family continually postpone their meeting.
With a variety of apt techniques, Rahmanian explores ‘the situation [Mansour] found himself in’, rather than the morality surrounding his case. Intimating its factual basis, the film starts off with a docu-style handheld camera. Its shaky images convey emotional tumult as we witness a confused murder scene, transport of Mansour between prison and gallows, and his family in a train, coming to visit his Tehran prison. Visual metaphors for death pepper the early scenes - a light extinguished, a door closing - and gorgeous cinematography - cityscapes and landscapes - represents the city/country conflict which motivates Mansour to murder. The cutting of memory scenes and flashback sequences is well done. Mansour’s longing for home emerges as he sits inert behind bars, remembering his courtship and marriage, moving to the city, and setting up home. His unbearable anxiety is captured in his agitated self-harm, intercut with rapid flashbacks of his life. (But one flashback contained scenes at which he was not present - his family coming to visit in the train!)
That we never know Mansour’s ultimate fate could have been Rahmanian’s most powerful device for focussing on the convict’s psychological state. But all efforts to dissect his torments are undermined by the fact that we learn little about the murder of which he is accused, including whether he really did it or not. This needed to be clear, as our feelings towards his suffering are inextricably linked to his culpability and remorse. Only if we knew for sure that Mansour were innocent would we resonate with the very sympathetic tone taken towards him. Delicate close-ups of his wife’s expressive face as he gives her a gift, and his hands holding those of his newborn baby make us think he’s a good guy. He’s stoical, and he’s popular with inmates and guards alike.
Unfortunately, that Mansour be guilty was actually Rahmanian’s intention. He wanted to examine, ‘the struggle inside [Mansour’s] mind to come to terms with what he had done.’ Given that Mansour has the flimsiest of motives, more or less that his city boss called him a country bumpkin, we just can’t empathise with him as Rahmanian wants us to. Perhaps if the film delved into years of repression and abuse, we could understand a man moved to murder. But the couple can’t have been in the city more than a year, and the victim doesn’t seem to have done anything nearly heinous enough to deserve murder. Even worse, Mansour seems to show no remorse for his crime; in fact, it hardly enters his thoughts at all. Considering he was sane and murdered a man for no good reason, it should have been circling relentlessly in his mind, troubling him with unbearable guilt.
Other problems with reality concerned prison life. Inmates nonchalantly betted on each others’ lives, unmoved by the executions. They had tea parties and sat knitting baby booties. Has Rahmanian ever researched what murder convicts think and do?
Mehran Kashani and Rahmanian’s script-writing was also primitive. Characters often told each other things they already knew for the benefit of the audience, ‘It’s your third time before the executioner,’ one inmate says to Mansour, or, ‘it’s lucky I’ve learnt welding, so I can work in the city,’ Mansour tells his father. Also jarring was the way characters directly addressed the camera to introduce the story: the doctor’s duty at the execution, the prison master’s (boring and lengthy) philosophy of punishment, Mansour’s father’s tale. Although meant to be documentary-style, it’s so uncommon in drama that it’s almost confusing.
Day Break attempts to examine an intriguing and important topic, but ultimately fails because the story is implausible.
