Director: Behnam Bahadori & Elham Asadi
Writer: Bahar Rohani
Cast: Ima Sanaye, Meysam Amini
Running time: 8mins
With 2024 having passed the half-way point, it’s time for another season of Saturday Matinees submissions. As I’ve mentioned before, this series was introduced to give filmmakers who cannot afford submission fees an opportunity to access Indy Film Library’s feedback, and also to introduce their work to new audiences.
That means we present artists from low-income backgrounds, opposition groups hit by censorship, or individuals hit by international sanctions waivers, so they can get some feedback on their work. But what it doesn’t mean is that those films necessarily have to be radical or even especially good to get that feedback. While we have uncovered quite a few hidden gems along the way, this is only about presenting marginalised voices with a platform – it’s also about helping those voices better use opportunities when they can access them.
To that end, the first filmmakers to open our fifth six-part series of Saturday Matinees are very much still in the development phase. Mission Complete is a short spy-thriller from Iran-based directors Behnam Bahadori and Elham Asadi – and struggles to deliver on that front from the very outset.
Ima Sanaye is an anonymous woman who spends most of the film taking a shower. As she gets ready to leave the house, her preparations include donning a black woolly hat and a full face of makeup – as it gradually emerges that she is some kind of contract killer, who has just completed her particular mission. Possibly due to media censorship in Iran, the shower scene is a long way from the risqué nature of similarly gratuitous scenes that would be present in Western spy fiction – but it adds nothing to the story, so gratuitous is exactly what it is.
The idea that she would be making such a leisurely escape from the scene of a murder she has just committed doesn’t make much practical sense. Neither does the fact that she is conspicuously trying to disguise herself as a man in Iranian society to distance herself from the crime – but taking the time to apply lipstick and mascara. Normatively speaking, it sabotages the disguise she is apparently making such a prolonged effort to cultivate.
The spy-thriller also struggles for actual thrills – even when a second killer arrives on the scene in a classic double-cross. The confrontation is brief and brutal – and suggests that Sanaye has potential which has been under-used here. She puts on a disturbingly effective display as her flame is snuffed out – but what should be a big climactic sequence in the film is something of a damp squib. At the same time, it kills off the most interesting angle at play as a spy thriller – a genre already dominated by tedious, male archetypes – and even as something slightly subversive in Iranian society. A woman in this line of work, even in fiction, would be something.
As it is, however, Bahadori and Asadi seem only interested in cycling through as many espionage tropes as quickly as possible. And in doing so, they fall foul of one of the biggest issues an independent filmmaker can face. If your film isn’t going to try to say or do anything new or controversial, if it’s going to just try and deliver a safe-bet and ape things which are already popular in mainstream cinema, it had better do that well. If not, it will end up being written off as a cheap and timid tribute act, which audiences will not favour spending time with. After all, why have semi-skimmed when you can have full-fat Hollywood action?
In the future, the team behind Mission Complete might want to concentrate on a less-intricate plot, in favour of centring around a twist or alternative element of a formula there are aping. They might have a little more success with future adventures into genre cinema in that case, even without the personnel or budget of a blockbuster.
The film will be available to view for free in full from 09:00 UK time on Saturday the 6th of July, until the end of the weekend, via our Saturday Matinees theatre page. You can also score it out of five. As the film is still trying to gain access to other festivals, the page is password protected. Use the code IFLMATINEE24 to access the film.