Director: Alireza Barazandehnejad
Writer: Alireza Barazandehnejad
Cast: Amirhossein Bagherian, Alireza Barazandehnejad & Mohammad Sahebi
Running time: 14mins
What About Payam? unfolds after women have been allowed to attend a football match somewhere in Iran. Trouble between hooligan factions in two rival clubs has resulted in disaster. As the steward tried to restore order, a warning shot he fired hit one of the women attending, killing her.
In the wake of this, we join the scatter-brained Mani Mohaghegh (Amirhossein Bagherian), as he is utterly skewered under interrogation. After the horrific events at the stadium, Mani is found to have taken matters into his own hands, and shot the steward. After dumping the body in an alleyway, he calls the police to try and convince them he is an innocent witness – but immediately talks himself into what we assume will be a lengthy jail term.
But just as the car-crash of an interview seems to be drawing to its inevitable conclusion, things turn on their head. Sitting opposite him, Payam (Alireza Barazandehnejad) is not in fact a detective, but a co-conspirator, preparing Mani for his interrogation with some verbal sparring. The killing has not even taken place yet, but he knows that they will need to be on message ahead of time, thanks to Mani’s shaky demeanour.
The thing is, there are some things you can’t teach. Even after some more extensive coaching from Payam, his colleague still resembles a deer in the headlights – and walks himself into every trap available. But almost comedically, in spite of how badly this seems destined to go, both men seem utterly resigned to the fact that they will go through with their plan to avenge the woman. Frankly, they may not even understand why themselves.
Perhaps this is the reason that Mani in particular is not in the right space to carry out the plan. He isn’t clear on his real motive, so how the hell is he supposed to lie around it convincingly?
There is some discussion about a gun which “landed on your car’s hood” – which seems a little lost in translation (it isn’t clear whether this is literal, in which case Barazandehnejad’s script probably needs to go a little way into explaining the actual logistics around it; or if this is a figurative way of saying God has chosen them to mete out justice) – before the pair go through yet another ill-fated dry-run. But largely it just seems that neither individual has a connection to either the woman at the stadium, or the steward who killed her. They do not seem to care much about football, or the advancing of women’s rights in Iran – including the right to attend sporting events – which the incident may set back.
Here, Barazandehnejad seems to be making a darkly satirical point. These two men have taken a moment of genuine tragedy, and utterly made it about themselves. This is an opportunity for them to feel morally superior, rather than genuinely help someone, or advance some wider and more noble cause. In doing so, their strange, preening behaviour seems to mirror that of the self-interested footballing authorities like Fifa’s incumbent reputation launderer in chief Gianni Infantino. They have made Iranian women attending matches a showpiece stunt, a misty-eyed ‘victory’, as long as you ignore the major constraints in place for those attending, and the massive remaining gender inequality in the country. But these men don’t genuinely care about any broader advancement of women’s rights, it’s just when they come under fire for their utter contempt of human rights in other areas, they could use the positive optics of looking like they care here.
Indeed, Payam and Mani are no saints, either, and their plan smacks of a need to convince themselves they are in fact the good guys. The mask slips, for example, when they discuss how they might wrong-foot a detective during an investigation by agreeing that it was the woman’s fault that she was shot, because she dared to attend a football match in the first place.
To this end, then, writer-director Barazandehnejad’s tale is a tightly scripted, engaging insight into the minds of men under patriarchy – and examined how even actions supposedly in the service of women are ultimately informed by a rigid hierarchical ideology that suits most men. His performance, and that of Bagherian as Mani should also be commended as naturalistic, and well-paced.
The problems (besides some moments such as their gun’s origin being unclear) really come from the format of the film. The action is unhelpfully framed in a clunky sequence of textual exchanges, where the two men set out ground-rules for their actions. But the discussions are largely superfluous thanks to their actual discussions.
At the same time, they are dispensed with half-way through, and replaced by even more grating text-exchanges from the real police, which heavy-handedly explain what transpired after the duo’s rehearsal. Again, when Payam and Mani appear in custody, it’s not really necessary for us to have been spoon-fed that information – and having less of it would have left room for either a better explanation behind “God sending us a gun”, or a more gradual and tense exchange, as Mani accidentally hands the detectives more and more information they need. It’s an amusing conclusion, but it might have been even better.
There’s a lot to like about What About Payam? The problem is that somewhere in the edit, it feels like it loses patience with the viewer, and our ability to reach conclusions on our own – and that this relates to things we probably could have easily figured out, when in fact there are things that need more exposition elsewhere in the film.