Cannes Review: Saeed Roustaee’s ‘Leila’s Brothers’
25.05.2022 - 19:25
/ deadline.com
They all hate each other, Leila (the magnificent Taraneh Alidoosti) tells her brother Alireza (Navid Mohammad Zadeh) when he returns to the family home. It is a rare visit; he works in an industrial plant somewhere on the other side of Iran. He isn’t going to tell his family that he has been laid off with the promise of pay that has never materialized; in the Tehran family that crowds Saeed Roustaee’s long and absorbing clan drama Leila’s Brothers, he is supposed to be the properly functioning son.
What can you say about the other three brothers in this Cannes competition film? There is Manouchehr (Payman Maadi) who, as they all like to say, thinks with his pectorals. Parvis (Farhad Aslani) is very fat and a heavy drinker; they all expect him to die any day, although he does seem to keep fathering children successfully. Farhad (Mohammad Ali Mohammadi) is a shyster who could barely lie straight in bed, which may have something to do with why his wife is divorcing him, taking half their flat with her and effectively leaving him homeless.
All out of work, these men have the faint reek of habitual spongers. It is 40-year-old Leila who holds down a dreadful job in the employment office, cooks and cleans for their parents and tries to plan a future for her middle-aged siblings, all the while looking down the barrel of dreary spinsterhood. Her wage supports them all. It is Leila who hates everyone but, of course, she loves them too.
Leila has every reason to hate her octogenarian father Heshmat, who deliberately ruined her chances with the man she wanted to marry by telling him she had some wasting disease. The monstrous paterfamilias is a stock figure of family drama, but Saeed Poursamimi conveys a confusion of wiliness,
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