This film opens with a long (duration) shot of wind blowing gently through treetops. With this scene and the ones that follow, we in the audience are left to watch and wait patiently until we connect with something beyond the onscreen materials — that is, with the invisible force that moves them. In scenes featuring human beings, that invisible force most often seems a deep sense of humanity that shakes loose from the most insignificant encounters. The film begins in a rural clinic, with a gentle and leisurely survey of the staff, patients and their diverse "syndromes". The dentist who moonlights as a glitter-shirted singer of Thai country music. The Buddhist monk in the dentist chair who really had wanted to be a deejay and comic book retailer, if he hadn't somehow been caught "in the grip of a mysterious force which keeps me in saffron robes" — just as we're caught by the mysterious force that keeps us in the grip of this film.

Through often absurdly-humorous exchanges, we follow the recurring thread of a love story, between Toey, a head female doctor at the clinic, and Nohng, a painfully shy male doctor who joins the staff and whose own malady — his love for her — seems truly incurable. As to the "century" part of the film's title, I suspect it has to do with the great era of Modernization in Thai society, though if that is so, its only implied in the second part of the film. For there is a great transformation here, when the film takes a sudden turn for the — oh, I don't know. Maybe the Godard?

In any case, mood goes from lovely to extraordinary to uncanny. The turn is a hairpin one, and it shook off several in our audience who weren't strapped in. It becomes apparent we've been thrust into the midst of some personal symbol system. And perhaps it will be helpful to know in advance that the story the director tells is autobiographical, of his parents' love story. But trying to decode this film is much less fun — and perhaps less therapeutic — than letting it wash over you. I could have stared for eternity at that shot, late in the film, of swirling steam, being sucked into a duct, in the modern, urban hospital where the story finally takes us. Whatever else it's doing, this film seems a folk remedy for Modernity, a way for past and future to coexist peacefully. In several places in this film, there is conspicuous reference to reincarnation, and the film manages formally the impossible trick of reincarnating itself, giving to the experience of personal transformation a quality of déjà vu, of past and future lives, and a firm sense of the one message I was able to decode: love conquers all — time, place, even logic. Mesmerizing.  

The original idea for this film, said the director after a CIFF screening, was his interest in exploring what happens to a man who suddenly steps out of his life into limbo. Who are any of us, once removed from the community which hitherto defined us? In this case, the answer is fairly predictable from the standpoint that most of us understand that the undefined life seems to dissolve and sink to the lowest available level. Successful in business as an optometrist and as a family man, Pétur discovers, through a chance blood-test, that he is not the father of the boy he'd thought for ten years was his son: and suddenly all bets are off.

The film's director named among his influences Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers — though I found this film less subtle and more abstracted from its environment than the works of those directors. The colors are mostly blue and cold — what one expects in a film from Iceland — and the weather prone to freezing drizzle. And you have to watch helplessly as the now-blind (or at least myopic) optometrist makes stubbornly stupid choices. He certainly does not have to play this hand the way he chooses, but like most of us he falls into reading off that well-worn script of wounded vanity making a bad situation worse. The only relief from the painful attempts and failures to accommodate this personal narrative-shift are occasional appearances by Pétur's brother-in-law-to-be, Börkur, who is so easy-going as to go with the flow in any direction.

Of course, Pétur could only have prevented his personal nose-dive by shouldering better and quicker the weight of this unexpected, unwelcome knowledge. Carrying some kind of personal weight or secret is something everyone in this film seems to be sentenced to do, one way or another, and how well one can manage under that circumstance seems to be close to the secret of life itself. I did like how the film keeps its own secrets, leaving out the details of the how and why and when of the past and not overplaying the end but leaving us with a solemn sense that while this story may have found some kind of resolution, the burden will always be there.  

The laws of physics are the same on earth as they are a hundred million light years away; the laws of human nature the same where you live and… Tehran. Iranian films always break my heart with how similar our peoples seem to be: of all the Middle East, this ancient-yet-modern and thriving culture could be one Americans might feel most at home in; these people could be our friends. If not for… extenuating circumstances. Like those laws of physics, the laws of jealousy, lust, workaday pressures, marital strife, parental love, and youthful romance work out their familiar cause-and-effect in this simple tale of domestic complexities. A young maid is pulled into the middle of a marriage in conflict: Rouhi sees all, with the most heart-melting openness of expression, a brown-eyed radiance that is the moral center of this film. Around that center rotates a storm as Morteza and Mojdeh wage a painful, misguided-yet-inevitable war, the probable cause the next-door beautician, Simin and the potential casualties including their little boy, and possibly that precious open, hopeful innocence of their maid — who is soon to be married herself.

Against the background of celebratory fireworks (including a few thrown by impish funsters), the story of this New Year's day pops and sizzles and fills the screen with the colors of the human condition, beautifully photographed and convincingly portrayed. Much more joyful and hopeful than many in the genre, this film belongs on that full shelf of movies that explore what it means to be a woman in contemporary Iran. And at important levels, what it means to be a woman in Iran is not a whole lot different than what it means to be a woman anywhere. Any culture that can be found so creatively and industriously carrying on a discussion this rich and deep about problems in their society seems to me well on the way to working them out. That is, if they're not interrupted by extenuating circumstances…