A review of the movie “Amphibia” directed by Barzou Niknejad / the coexistence of Hindi and Persian films!

Charso Press: In the last few years, Iran’s social cinema has turned to many issues such as poverty, discrimination, delinquency, addiction, etc. with chaotic and noisy mezzanines. The problems of such movies, due to their popular and shared origin, can become a correct cultural source for the causes of social harms if they are paid for. Addressing each of the mentioned issues requires the script’s idea to be active so that the characters move forward step by step with the story line and drama effects and their paths do not end in separate ways with respect to the script’s theme..

The film “Two Lives” written and directed by “Berzo Niknejad” clearly does not know what conditions to reflect the contemporary social situation and tries to continue living in a thematic uncertainty and storytelling sloppiness. As much as the film tries to show itself as problem-oriented and even shows the beginning of the film with the robbery of the lower class of the south of the city from Faradast on the wedding night, it shows that it cannot stop the coexistence of the sentimentalism of the upper class. In the movie “Amphibia”, the audience encounters the middle class, which has both the characteristics of the upper class and the characteristics of the lower class, and depending on the type of situation, they have to taste the wound of the situation! The character of Atta (played by Javad Ezzati) as the main sullen and sad hero of the film, is more similar to the irrational fighters of the fifties, who is supposed to play the role of problem-solving nuts for those around him. In the process of the film, the audience can never understand how this character has a relationship with two other friends, namely Hamid (played by Hadi Hejazifar) and Mojtabi (Pejman Jamshidi), and the question arises for him, why such a character, who seems financially secure and is a photography model, he must have cooperated with Mojtaba during the robbery! The audience will never understand the background of these three middle-aged young people, and even the reason for the geography of the film, which takes place in an old and abandoned garage, must be added to other mental reasons.!

““Two Lives” is so inclined to the complexity of the narrative that it sacrifices the logic of the story and turns Atta into a paradoxical intellectual who is supposed to become both Mojtaba’s savior and Maryam (played by Ilham Akhwan) and with the introduction of Maryam’s character. that the same glimmers of hope in Barzou Niknejad’s filmmaking about observing the basic principles of cause and effect relationships in the film fall apart! How it is possible for the three men in this story to be in love with Maryam at the same time, who took refuge in Ata’s crypt, is perhaps the biggest question of the film. It’s as if the screenwriter, having only preconceptions, begins to write and extend a three-line (exposed) and at the time of recording, due to the ambiguity of many things such as the relationship of Saifi (played by Mani Haghighi) with Ata, the emotional relationship of Azadeh (played by Setare Pesiani) with Ata, the humorous characterization of Hamid (which was only done because of the deception of the audience) In order to dramatize the story and many others, Atta’s father’s illness (played by Orakt Saeed Poursamimi) has turned to only close-up and extreme close-up scenes of the characters, so that the audience gets pained by the mimicry of the director’s fierce acting of his characters. and be bored. It’s as if the director doesn’t know or can’t imagine the problems that happened to his characters in a bigger frame and present it..

During the story, the anonymous and unidentified characters of the film make the night the morning and the morning the night, without knowing that each of them has the ability to be multi-personality. That Atta somehow takes responsibility for Maryam’s pregnancy and makes her a concubine, that Azadeh wants her to take Maryam’s wing for a while considering that she is in love with Atta, that both Hamid and Maryam are introduced as a foolish character. In the form of an innocent character and at the end of the movie, both of them turn into monsters‎why should Sefi become an anti-hero alternative against these three catalyst friends without any background of him being shown other than being rich and swindling, that Atta’s father did not want to take revenge on Syfi, Rambovar explodes Syfi’s gas capsule warehouse, that people doubt each other at the peak of trust and have complete confidence in each other at the peak of skepticism, is not a sign of multi-layered characters, but the introduction of multi-personality people who cannot be can’t be recognized or understood, and the director, in a deliberate and self-conscious structure, has thrown them together in a parking lot to fight each other from time to time in terms of filmic action. It must be said that the cinema of Barzo Niknejad has no female issue to focus on in Amphibian, because this issue becomes the Achilles heel of the film and the director smiles and does not look at everything that looks feminine and planted instead of reaping. Masculine to social issues, even from the point of view of typical stereotypes, a familiar character in this movie genre is lame! Even in terms of breaking the taboo of Maryam’s character’s pregnancy and people’s betrayal of each other, the film is revealed on the screen very disorderly and unthought! The aimlessness of the characters and the chain-like rotation of the chain of events cause the audience to face a movie in Amphibian, which by forming a love square, remembers the chivalry of the Persian film and the romance of the Indian film, and the director, in expressing the social issue like this and his model, only with Borrowing from the biological form of the frog in his film brings the coexistence of Persian and geometric film, where the characters have to go underwater in an authorial surprise.!