REVIEW: ‘Taboor’ (EIFF 2013)

Taboor didn’t open the 2013 Edinburgh International Film Festival (an Iranian sci-fi film about a man who wears a tin-foil suit might have been a hard sell at the opening night gala), but it does at least have the honour of opening Geekzine’s coverage of said event.  Beautifully shot, with a glacial pace, precious little dialogue and a plot which invites the audience to fill in a number of gaps by themselves, Taboor could be said to typify the sort of pretentious art-house productions with which many modern film festivals (Edinburgh included) have become associated in the eyes of critics.  But to so dismiss this beguiling film from promising Iranian writer/director Vahid Vakilifar would be to do a disservice to a movie which, whilst at times almost infuriating in its cryptic meandering, is far from a mere exercise in self-indulgence.

The film opens in the home of its unnamed protagonist; a sparse single room apparently lined with tin-foil.  The man (Mohammad Rabbanipour) dresses in a suit of similar material before heading out into the night, travelling through an eerily silent Tehran to ply his trade as an exterminator, rooting out cockroach infestations in labyrinthine tower blocks and tumble-down suburban mansions.  As the film progresses, though, hints are dropped that the world of Taboor is not quite that of contemporary Iran, and these incongruities lead to a plethora of niggling questions.  The exterminator, it is revealed, wears his silver suit to protect against “microwaves”, but what is the source of these microwaves, and why does only he, out of seemingly everyone in Tehran, take this precaution?  He has no discernible means of communication, so how do his clients contact him?  Is he really living in a desolate, post-apocalyptic city or has he simply gone mad, and his clients and doctors are humouring him?  And what is the significance of the sadistic game he plays for money with the wealthy dwarf who lives in a vast, empty house?  Vakilifar provides no solid answers to the questions raised by his narrative, an approach which is simultaneously frustrating and ambiguously liberating.  The audience is thus invited to become a co-author in the film’s story, filling in the gaps as they feel appropriate to create myriad different interpretations.  One possible reading of the facts, though, does seem to point to a particularly plausible scenario.

The exterminator is the only character we encounter who dons a silver suit (and sleeps in a foil cocoon) to protect against microwave radiation.  Either nobody else in Tehran knows of the danger, nobody else cares about it, or nobody else is affected by it.  Additionally, the film pays subtle homage to the sci-fi cinema of yesteryear, with the appearance of copious amounts of the same tin-foil used to make ‘robot’ costumes in vintage films, and the brief passage of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack played as background music in one scene.  Taken together, these hints suggest that the exterminator is in fact a synthetic life-form, created for an unknown purpose, being slowly fried by microwaves from an unknown source, microwaves which leave his human peers unharmed.  But of course, this is merely one possible interpretation of Taboor, and there are other ways of reading the movie.

Despite its achingly slow pace and join-the-dots storytelling, Taboor remains a captivating film precisely because it forces the viewer to constantly reassess what they’re seeing.  Vakilifar’s choice of alien and futuristic locations within Tehran itself helps to unsettle assumptions about time and place, with spiraling metallic stairwells, underground generator rooms and the clunking, roaring grandeur of vast, implied mechanisms behind the city’s walls giving the impression of a world slightly stranger than our own.  Mohammad Rabbanipour uses only movement and facial expression to convey a profound but dignified sense of sadness on the part of the exterminator, and his performance anchors the film for its largely dialogue-free duration.  Because of these qualities, although Taboor is not an easy film to watch, it will reward those who stay the distance.

Taboor is showing Friday 21st June at 6pm (Cineworld), and Tuesday 25th June at 7.45pm (Filmhouse).