“Its comedy may not always be divine, but Divine Comedy is a further showcase of Asgari’s varied talent.”

“Why do you insist on this forbidden film?”

After premiering his film Terrestrial Verses in Cannes in 2023, upon returning to Iran director Ali Asgari was banned from travelling abroad for eight months, and many of his belongings were confiscated from his apartment, only to be returned after some weeks. These incidents led to the introspective hybrid Higher Than Acidic Clouds, in which Asgari delves into the images that authorities could never take away from him: those in his memory. Being a filmmaker in Iran is a tricky endeavor and not without danger, as a host of directors that came before him can attest. Asgari’s latest film, Divine Comedy, will not make him any more popular with the Iranian censorship board, in particular because the board itself is at the core of his protagonist’s problems in getting a film screened. It is unlikely that Asgari himself will get to show Divine Comedy in Iran, but festival audiences stand a good chance of encountering this subversive comedy that has Asgari transport Woody Allen to Tehran.

Bahram (Bahram Ark, whose brother Bahman plays his twin; the two are normally behind the camera together) is nervous. He has to get a screening permit for his new film, but Iran’s censors can be very strict. In a meeting with a faceless nemesis his fear appears not unfounded: could he please remove a scene that sympathizes with a dog (an ‘offense’ that Asgari later repeats)? And why is the film in Turkish instead of Farsi? Surely he can change the language. Bahram argues that the historical figure at the heart of his film was a Turk, but this argument falls on deaf ears; Scorsese made The Last Temptation of Christ in English, and nobody complained, right? Who could argue with such logic? Without a permit but determined to screen the film in Iran, Bahram and his producer Sadaf (Sadaf Asgari) embark on an odyssey to find a screening room willing to take the risk of showing the film. This leads them through a string of encounters with a theater owner who only programs silly comedies (these do get a pass, and Bahram despises them), a cocaine-snorting failed actor, and a wealthy animal rights activist, along with an unwelcome reminder that the authorities are keeping an eye on him. And then there is the self-proclaimed prophet, who promises Bahram that he will lead him out of his purgatory.

This is one of several references to Dante’s poem from which the film takes its title, and whose arc from hell to heaven through purgatory it loosely follows. An aptly named Dante Café, in which a devil-like figure in the form of a censorship board official tries to convince Bahram to switch to the more commercial and less incendiary side that he looks down upon is a bit more on the nose, with the locale’s color scheme and occasional burst of flames from the bar suggesting one of hell’s circles. He eventually does reach heaven though, when he manages to hold a clandestine screening at a private mansion. He is, however, quickly brought down to the earthly realm: Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator and longtime ally of Iran, has fallen; his cinema has to cede the silver screen to reality.

It is hard not to trip over the many movie references littered throughout the screenplay by Asgari and frequent collaborator Alireza Khatami. Some are part of a running gag of Bahram being confronted with the kind of popular cinema he looks down upon, from a Rocky retrospective (“Sport films under the eye of sociology“) to The Fast and the Furious 2. Other name-drops range from Asgari’s own Terrestrial Verses to Blue Is the Warmest Colour (in reference to Sadaf’s hair) to Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and a large photo of Jean-Luc Godard adorning the wall in Bahman’s living room. His and Bahram’s love for cinema was born from another film that Bahram proclaims to not like anymore, The Matrix. They even tried bending a spoon, Bahman recalls; “I still do sometimes,” confesses Bahram, using the spoon as a metaphor for his own struggle against an oppressive system, a struggle akin to that of his childhood hero Neo.

Even though, like its namesake, the film deals with very serious subjects such as artistic freedom or the lack thereof and the nonsensical, forced dichotomy between commercial filmmaking and arthouse cinema, Divine Comedy is very much what its title suggests. It is also a sly nod to Bahram’s snobbery, given that in Dante’s era comedy was considered a lower artform. It is hard not to recognize a little Woody Allen in the film; Bahram may not physically resemble Allen, but the tone he (and Asgari) strike approximates Allen’s works in which the octogenarian himself starred. Bahram’s neuroticism and bewilderment drive the film, and Ark’s performance in the role is brilliant, deftly weaving and bobbing through lengthy dialogue scenes that have his character in a constant state of confoundment. After the somber tone of Higher Than Acidic Clouds, it is good to see Asgari return to a more pointed and indeed sometimes acidic criticism of Iran’s strict rules, all packaged in a casual comedy that begins and ends with what’s surely another movie reference, if not another nod at oppression: the Ethio-jazz of Mulatu Astatke’s Tezeta, made famous last year by RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. Its comedy may not always be divine, but Divine Comedy is a further showcase of Asgari’s varied talent.