Taghi, a shy, slavish postman who lives with his wife Monir in a remote area of northern Iran, is also the parttime manservant to the local landowner, Niattolah, who, along with a veterinarian treating Taghi for sexual impotence, takes every opportunity to humiliate him. When Niattolah’s nephew returns from the West to transform his uncle’s dairy farm into a more profitable pig farm, he seduces Monir – an act that contributes to the postman’s rapid descent into madness and murder. An indispensable work of the Iranian New Wave, Postchi is a biting critique of Iran’s blind Westernization and the tragic consequences of the clash between a corrupting modernity and an ineffectual tradition. Inspired by Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, the film uses sexual impotence as a metaphor for a country whose resources remain out of reach and unconsummated for the underclass: Taghi lives near the sea but cannot swim; he gets his hand on a gun but cannot fire it. Even the notion of a pig farm – whose product is forbidden to Muslims – is utterly absurd. Allegories are woven into satire – an animal farm populated by humans – and while the film may be read as a testimony to class repression, it ultimately expresses a deeper fear of all things human. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Postchi plays almost like a sequel to Mehrjui’s 1969 film Gaav (The Cow), in which actor Ezzatollah Entezami (here playing the landowner) famously metamorphosed into his beloved dead cow. But it is Ali Nassirian, in a bravura performance in the title role, who breathes life into one of the seminal images of the underdog in a cinema of dissent that reached its peak in 1970s Iran. Amos Vogel, who was among the first to recognise the film’s “successful fusing of pathos, humour, and preoccupation with the poor”, compared Postchi’s ferocity to the works of Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica. The film possesses an uncanny ability to shift almost imperceptibly from symbolic satire to a metaphysical realm, as the camera slowly surrenders to Taghi’s fractured psyche – where his terrified and terrifying subjectivity becomes our own.

Ehsan Khoshbakht