Venice 2024 review: Boomerang (Shahab Fotouhi)

“An insightful and sharply observed film about relationships and the erosion of manhood with a unique artistic approach.”

A flirt across the street at a traffic stop. Romance is in the air. The meet-cute between Minoo and Keyvan would be the perfect setup for an Iranian rom-com, but in Shahab Fotouhi’s Boomerang the search for romance comes flying back in your face like the film’s title. A slice of life in modern Tehran, Fotouhi’s film shows that falling in love is one thing, but keeping a relationship stable is a far more difficult feat. At times aimlessly meandering like one does on long walks with a new love, Boomerang is an insightful and sharply observed film about relationships and the erosion of manhood with a unique artistic approach that harkens back to one of the most lauded and remarkable films of recent years.

Have you ever tried to commit suicide?” Not quite the question you would expect on a first date, but maybe what Minoo (Yas Farkhondeh) and Keyvan (Ali Hanafian) share is not really a date. A wordless connection across a street leads to a day spent in Tehran guessing each other’s name and simply talking about life. Minoo’s mid-length hair with bright green ends sticks out from under her beanie, a first indication how young and modern women in Tehran deal with the obligatory nature of head covers. Her parental home (which has a boomerang prominently hanging from its walls) is one of unspoken anger and annoyance, and far from the idyllic romance Minoo and Keyvan are embarking on. Behzad (Arash Naimian), her father, has an unhealthy obsession with the love life of his neighbors, whose lovemaking apparently gets through the walls of the adjacent apartment. Her mother Sima (Leili Rashidi) has doubts about moving on from this man she once looked at the same way Minoo looks at Keyvan when he performs magic tricks for her and her friends. When Behzad forces a chance meeting with his ex Sadaf (Shaghayegh Jodat), she tells him that it was his inertia that did the relationship in, and that seems to be the exact reason why Sima feels herself drifting away from Behzad and into finding an apartment for herself and Minoo.

These scenes from an Iranian marriage are interspersed with not just the inertia of Minoo and Keyvan’s time spent together, newly discovering each other in a phase of their relationship where inertia is a feature, not a bug; but also by scenes of everyday life in Iran’s capital, with discussions at the neighborhood sandwich shop about the quality of life in Tehran, or moments of young women just hanging out and having fun. It’s in these moments that Fotouhi’s eye for composition and the possibilities of dreaminess reaches its peak. They also provide him with more opportunity to show the inventive ways women skirt the rules of covering their hair, although it is Leili Rashidi’s Sima (and in turn the actress herself) who bravely simply removes her scarf even in front of a broker when she is apartment hunting. What at first seems to be a contrast between generations reveals itself to be more a contrast between the sexes, juxtaposing the open-minded Minoo and Sima with the more traditional role-bound Behzad, who clearly has difficulty realigning with the shifting of traditional male and female roles.

Boomerang was co-edited by Alexandre Koberidze (the film was produced by New Matter Films, which also did Koberidze’s critical success What De We See When We Look at the Sky?), and at times the influence is definitely felt. The way some scenes meander, carefree and without impetus, does remind one of the Georgian director’s film, which is also partially constructed around a chance meeting. Boomerang is a more structured film though, with enough narrative to drive it forward. Its look at a crumbling marriage and the emasculation of an insecure man at the hands of his wife, his former lover, and his daughter is as taut as its portrayal of young love is freewheeling, which makes for a confident debut for Fotouhi.