Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Moment of Innocence
1997 · Mohsen Makhmalbaf · A Moment of Innocence on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the two older men block the scene together. (staging)
Makhmalbaf and the man he stabbed argue over where the girl should stand, how the boy should approach, where to hide the knife under the bread, rehearsing the same street corner over and over.
Payoff: The planning itself is the film. Every choice about staging a memory is also an argument about what that memory means.
Notice characters looking straight into the camera. (camera)
Makhmalbaf keeps the camera present as a participant rather than a hidden observer, with people positioned for it, addressed by it, and reminded out loud that it's there.
Payoff: You're never allowed to forget that everything you're watching is being built in front of you.
Watch the ex-policeman coach his own younger double. (performance)
Mirhadi Tayebi wants the boy playing him to look dashing and beloved, still holding onto a romantic version of the day he was stabbed, twenty years and one grudge later.
Payoff: You're watching a man direct his own memory into something more flattering than what happened.
Follow two separate rehearsals happening at once. (structure)
The film keeps switching between the young militant's storyline and the young policeman's storyline, plus the older men's arguments about both, so you're tracking several versions of one day.
Payoff: The switching keeps reminding you that a single afternoon can be remembered as several different stories at once.
Notice the flat winter light on wet streets. (light)
The film stays gray, damp, and unglamorous throughout, Tehran shot for texture rather than beauty, plain streets standing in for a plain, unresolved memory.
Payoff: The drab surface keeps the street plain, so small human gestures stand out.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch two men rehearse a memory neither of them can agree on, and the young actors standing in for them.