By Jack Deegan
Staff Writer
After much anticipation, two-time Academy Award-winning director Asghar Farhadi’s newest movie, “A Hero” has finally been released on Amazon Prime Video for all to watch. Gaining lots of traction last year while traveling the film festival scene, “A Hero” won several awards including the Grand Prix at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival as well as many foreign language film awards.
The Persian film, which takes place in Iran, follows Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi), who is put in prison after he is unable to repay a debt he has owed for three years. While he is on a two-day leave from the prison, his girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahir Goldoust) comes into possession of a handbag full of gold that Rahim uses to try and pay back his creditor. But things don’t go as planned and he ends up returning the gold to the original owner — which drastically changes his life.
“A Hero” is a terrific slow-burn movie that builds on its story with increasingly interesting layers as time goes on. What Rahim had intended to be a good deed spiraled out of control in ways he could have never imagined. The film delivers an emotional story as we follow this man trying to fix the biggest problem in his life so he can spend time with his son and marry his girlfriend. The plot of this film is really great and only gets you more invested the more you watch, becoming genuinely stressful at points.
While this movie might have a relatively simple narrative in place, its focus and exploration on morality make for a very thought-provoking film. The story is told from Rahim’s perspective and it’s very easy to support and get behind him as a character from the beginning of the movie. As time goes on, he endures moral dilemmas that make you question how good of a person he truly is. This is only amplified with the introduction of his creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh). We’re originally against him as a character since he keeps Rohim behind bars and away from his family, but as time goes on, we hear about all the good he’s done to help Rohim over the years. There’s a scene in the movie that brings the theme of morality to the surface and directly addresses it, as Bahram questions what merits celebrating a good deed and why Rahim is given special treatment for it, while Bahram has done countless good things and gets no rewards. We see the two rivals do good and bad things to each other over this debt, and they both have their own justifications that makes it hard to decide who is in the right and wrong. It’s really interesting to think about as we’re forced to confront these tough decisions in a moral gray area.
One of this movie’s biggest strengths is characterization — Rahim is by no means a bad person despite all of the things he does in this movie. He actively tries to do the right thing the entire time but in order to do that, he has to tell a white lie which only snowballs into something out of his control. Rahim does not try to hurt anyone. He just wants to be out of prison in order to be a good role model for his son.
All of the main characters in this film are fleshed out well, and we get to explore the reasons behind these morally gray decisions. Rahim and Bahram play jump rope with the line between good and bad. The film tackles the concept of morality in a way that I have never seen before and really had me struggling to figure out who was in the right — in the best way possible.
“A Hero” is a wonderful slow-burn movie that adds new layers as time goes on, tackling the hard-hitting question of morality in an incredibly emotional way. I recommend seeing past the subtitles on screen to enjoy this thought-provoking film.
