Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari’s last entry on the festival circuit was Higher Than Acidic Clouds in 2024 – it was a personal documentary that traced his emotional experience of being banned from travelling out of the country by the Iranian government. But his newest Venice Orizzonti world premiere, Divine Comedy, is more of a stylistic relative to his earlier film Terrestrial Verses, which he co-directed with Alireza Khatami (The Things You Kill [+leggi anche:
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Filmmaker Bahram Ark (playing a fictionalised version of himself) and his producer Sadaf Asgari (the actress also plays a fictionalised version of herself) set out to screen Bahram’s film – a loose adaptation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, he claims. However, the Iranian Ministry of Culture will not allow him to do so unless he severely censors and reshoots the work. The two thus decide to follow some leads that come up, which embroils them in some peculiar encounters – fetching cocaine from a drone and a run-in with a man who claims to be a prophet, among others – in order to accomplish their mission.

Divine Comedy starts off with an audiovisual motif that feels partly pulled from a romantic comedy, set to a breezy jazz score that immediately sets the light, subversive tone of the film. The two happily hit the road on their baby-pink Vespa, Roman Holiday-style, with Sadaf driving and Bahram’s hands on her shoulders – and this returns several times, playing out almost like a sitcom cue every time we hear that jazzy music. However, Asgari relies quite heavily on this to signal to the viewer that everything will be okay, a choice that eventually tries one’s patience.

Like in Terrestrial Verses, Divine Comedy plays out more or less as a series of vignettes (although considerably more interconnected here), shot as long, static scenes from one perspective. We never see the first face of bureaucracy, for instance, with the camera trained on Bahram’s face the entire time as he squirms under the bizarre line of questioning regarding the censorship of his film (“Cinema is fantasy,” he is told, “not reality.”). The journey is certainly the destination in this film, even if Divine Comedy feels a bit like an exercise that has been done before. While it delivers its fair share of ironic humour, one can’t help but think about how there might be a more biting version of this work nestled deep within its premise that never fully emerges.

Divine Comedy is a production between Iran’s Seven Springs Pictures and Iran’s Taat Films, co-produced with Turkey’s Kadraj, Italy’s Zoe Films, France’s Salt for Sugar and Germany’s Films Studio Zentral. Goodfellas holds the rights to the film’s world sales.