Then the film flashed back to the time when she was with his wife during a promotion of one of his books at a book store. We learn that Sahel was in prison ostensibly because he was considered against an Islamic fundamentalist revival and revolution which deposed the more Western oriented Shah but really because his chauffeur had fallen in love with his beautiful wife, who rejected him and for reasons of jealousy, falsely accused both him and her of anti-revolutionary activities as a result of which Mina had to serve a 10 year jail sentence, during which she was given one chance of meeting her husband and to have sex with him with a hood over their faces in a room in the prison but in the middle of which, her former chauffeur substituted himself for her husband, something which she immediately discovered. In the interval, she gave birth to a pair of twins. Upon her release was falsely told that her husband had died in the meantime and was buried in an unmarked grave in the wilderness. The first thing she did when she got out was to visit that grave. We see her in a flowing black gown and hood, crouching , reflecting, touching a slanting slab of stone which served as a gravestone, which she believed to be that of her former husband, weeping silently, like Mary before the tomb of Jesus. In the distance, we see the vastness of the sky and the land behind the deserted piles of stones.
After Sahel got out, he went to where her former wife was then living, a house by the seaside in Istanbul with her two children. She had become a Madame, obsessed with tattooing a line or two of his verses upon such part of the bodies of her hookers as would be prepared to have it done. He went to observe her in his car by the seaside day after day. He did not want to disturb her new life. In the course of such observation, he got to know two young hookers to whom he would give free rides back to town. But he would not touch them until, one day, when the hookers were late and were beaten up by the hooker racketeers and he went to their aid and got beaten too. They went to his house to take care of his lacerations. It was there that he discovered a line of his own poetry on the back of one of the hookers, whom the other told him was tattooed on her by her mother. Then we see him being tattooed by Mina, who did not recognize him after so many years. Shortly after that, we see him meet his former chauffeur whom he asked to enter his car. Then he drove the car over a cliff and the two drowned together. When the film ends, we see him, back towards us, walking on a salt flat following a distance behind what appears to be the back of Mina towards the light on the far horizon.
It's a simple but grueling tale of love, of passion, of jealousy and of revenge, told with magnificent photography, with its impeccable composition, sublime and sometimes sensuous lights, shadows and suggestions of suffocating claustrophobia and of the immensity of space, which is more than merely physical. There is scarcely any dialogue. It's not really necessary. As we see images after images of neutral yet sombre blues and greys and lifeless yellows, we hear in voice-off different lines of Sahel's beautiful poetry about the suffering and the irrational forces of love, its hopes, its longing, the power of its passion and its lingering effects in one's memories.The acting of Behrouz Vossoughi and that of Monica Belluccis was simply superb, both of whom have got that intense and yet far away look upon their face which seem to bespeak the profound desolation and melancholy consuming their hearts and which turns their faces into an eternal blank. Vossoughi has got eyes which seem to understand everything yet throughout the film, he would keep his his mouth and his identity completely sealed. Hence the tension and its power. A beautifully made film which I love.
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