The walls are immense. We quiver just to look at them. When we imagine scaling their heights, we tremble all the more because we know that to fall from them would be our death. This is us, the audience, at the start of Asghar Farhadi’s film A Hero as we see the mountain of Iran’s Naqsh-e Rostam necropolis (holding the tombs of four kings of the First Persian Empire) fill the frame behind our protagonist.
Rahim Soltani walks in front of these great cliffs and then climbs a restoration scaffold up a seemingly interminable height. He has come to talk to his brother-in-law Hossein who is working up high in the tomb of Xerxes I. When we learn that Rahim is out on leave from debtor’s prison for only two days, we understand why he climbed up rather than waited for Hossein at the bottom. Rahim comes asking Hossein to convince his creditor Bahram to allow him to be free from prison because Rahim now has some of the money needed to pay off his debt.
A web of moral and ethical questions, ever-tightening throughout the runtime of the film, begins to form when we find out how Rahim plans to make this payment. He hopes to use the gold coins his girlfriend Farkhondeh found in a forgotten handbag at a bus stop. When Rahim’s conscience cries out and he expresses that he just can’t take that money for his own, Farkhondeh replies, “I thought that all that praying to God made Him have pity of us and provide a miracle.” Ultimately disbelieving that theory, the two of them decide to try to find the owner of the money and give it back. When a woman claiming to be the owner of the coins shows up, they give the money to her. The administrators of Rahim’s prison then sweep him up into a festival of media attention meant to honor him for his honesty.
After a brief season of public favor, Rahim falls quickly into disrepute when questions about the veracity of his story emerge. He had initially fudged smaller details of the story to keep the role of his girlfriend out of the public eye. The dishonored man’s lowest point comes, perhaps, when he angrily confronts his creditor for spreading rumors that have kept Rahim from getting a job. Rahim is publicly bloodied in the scuffle that ensues, and the community witnesses yesterday’s hero wallowing in the mud of an indignity that may be even worse than that of debtor’s prison.
This whirlwind of events ends up seeming like a mountain of retribution landing on the head of this man who started out with a mere unpaid debt. We see how Rahim is being punished for his crimes, but the chastising he receives in the public’s eye in some ways seems outsized in comparison to the sins and mistakes he has made. This portrayal of the seeming absurdity and unreasonable punishment meted out by human systems (even ones on a social rather than legal level) is one of the many interesting ways this film grapples with issues of crime and punishment. Making this picture even more complex is the way the punishments Rahim receives are sometimes the result of other people’s sins and mistakes.
Rahim feels the confusion and weight of all this, and as we contemplate his journey we viewers too may feel the weight of the world pressing down on our weary shoulders. This weight reminds us of that mountain at the start of the film. The mountain that is huge and impossible to climb. Could this mountain represent the impenetrable and overwhelming system of legal, social, and relational justice around Rahim? Could it represent God Himself and His holy standard that may seem impossible for man to live up to?
If the mountain does indeed represent those things and the film presses all of that heaviness down upon us, we must ask whether it leaves us crushed and bleeding on the ground by the time the credits roll. I don’t think it does, but our escape is a narrow one. We make it out with our lives only because of a crucial choice Rahim makes in the final moments of the film. With this choice, Rahim abandons himself to the power of the law at the very same moment that he becomes free. By this choice, he somehow becomes more free than he has been the entire film even though this is a different freedom than we expected he might find. Among other things, he becomes free from a deathly cycle of punishing himself and punishing others. Though we are still reeling, this may remind us of other stories of grace we have heard. Other stories, perhaps in story books or holy books, in which the mountain is mighty but yet the hero, or you and I, are spared. – Brian Duignan (ScreenAttention.com)
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