There is a video on youTube
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rv5YCrFwWE4) that takes a scene from
Gaav and replaces the dialog with a fake one. You could say that it
looks funny while the movie is too tragic to make fun of it; but this
video is emphasizing a political level in a movie with so many levels
of understanding.

And it is a political level in Gaav, no doubt about it: think only
about the menacing apparitions of the robbers from the neighboring
village, and the revenge incursions: they are the robbers, we are only
protecting our assets and lives; it sound very Mid East indeed.

Dariush Mehrjui returned to Iran after studying philosophy at UCLA and
started to make movies. It was in the sixties, Iran was under Shah's
regime, and Mehrjui was one of the guys from the westernized elite. So
you could expect from him movies within some American standards.

Well, Gaav, made by Mehrjui in 1969, is very far from any American
artistic frame. You could think at Italian Neorealism and French
Avant-Garde. I would rather say Pasolini: Gaav calls Pasolini's works
in mind. However, beyond any comparison, for a Westernized viewer the
subject is so Iranian specific that the typical reaction would be
stupor. And to say Iranian specific is actually misleading! A remote
primitive village where a symbolic story takes place. Gaav has the
structure of a ballade. Think at Parajanov! It is made with extreme
simplicity and economy: things happen just because that's the way they
should happen, reasonable explanations are useless.

No wonder Gaav was banned immediately by Shah's censors: how to allow
a movie about an Iranian village so far from modernity? The movie was
smuggled in 1972 and presented at Venice at the Mostra. Without
subtitles. No need of them, anyway: the images, and that unique rhythm
as of a ballade were speaking for themselves.

Mehrjui went on making movies. He left later Iran, for France, he made
movies there. And after some years he came back to Iran, for
homesickness. He's been going on with making movies ever since.

They say Ayatollah Komeini renounced to ban movies in Iran after
watching Gaav - I don't know whether it's true, but, if it is, it
means that the Ayatollah had a great taste! Because it's much easier
to be revolted by the movie! The subject is as simple as it can be:
there is a village, poor and primitive, Hassan is the only one
possessing a cow in the village, the cow dies, Hassan gets mentally
insane.

Is Hassan mad? Well, obviously. A man who believes that he is no more
himself, but his cow, that's madness on all accounts.

Madness? Hassan was living in his own universe ignoring the real
world. But here's the point: Hassan had always lived in his own
universe - he and his cow. A whole system of memories: events lived
together. Natural phenomenons lived together and having a particular
significance for them: a whole system of codes and signals. Was it
full moon? It meant the cow was thirsty.

This universe could not disappear once the cow was no more. The
memories were still in place. The codes and signals were still in
place. Was it full moon? It meant the cow was still thirsty.

So Hassan was just defending now this universe of him; only his
universe was no more fit with the world. Hence, the madness.

Usually, when the beloved one is no more, the survivor is tempted to
imagine that the other is still somewhere, not far. You go to the
cemetery and speak to your beloved one, who is buried there. Hassan
was trying something more forceful: to imagine that he, Hassan was
somewhere, not far, and that the cow was here, in his body, instead of
him! I know how it sounds, but it was Hassan's way to keep his universe.

Meanwhile life was going on in this village. A bunch of clay houses
surrounding a small dirty pool. Old men chatting at some kind of a tea
house, old women attending silently the daily events and waiting for
the outcome, the village idiot tortured by kids for mere distraction,
the nightly incursions of neighboring villagers: just a small closed
universe around a small dirty pond.

Faced with the sudden madness of Hassan, the community comes to help,
with great kindness and patience, to discover that help is sometimes
useless and that kindness and patience ultimately have limits.

A tragic ballade telling us that some things happen just because
that's their way to happen and nobody could change anything.