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After moving his family – father, mother, and pregnant wife – out of their small village and into the big city of Tehran, promising them many great things due to his recent employment with a construction company, Mansour is understandably peeved when his boss reneges on his promises, and belittles the village man and denies him work. When Mansour’s rage boils over and he kills the boss in a fit of passion, he finds himself on the wrong side of Islamic Law, and becomes a ward of the state as he awaits his victim’s family’s decision on whether he should live or die.
As they repeatedly fail to show up to the hearings, Mansour starts to crack under the stress of not knowing whether he will hang or go free.
I was really excited to get this disc from the fine folks at Topics Entertainment – one of four films in their Foreign Films box set – as I’ve never seen an Iranian film before. The good news is that it is a deeply sensitive film, utilizing images and mood over dialogue and bombast. The bad news is, I am so ignorant of Iranian culture that I have no idea if what I watched was true to life or propaganda. So I’ll just go ahead and take it solely on the merits of its story and delivery.
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The story opens with Mansour being awoken in his cell for a medical inspection. As it turns out no man is allowed to be put to death unless he is certified healthy by a doctor. Illness means the execution is postponed. This may seem insane, but what is sane about death row? As Mansour is led to his examination, we find out from the doctor en route that this is his third time examining Mansour, as the family of the victim always finds a reason to not be at the hearing. And seeing how it is their divine right to judge Mansour, he is shuffled back to his cell each time they are absent.
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As the doctor points out, and the audience must concur, this is a form of torture for Mansour. Indeed, the doomed man is clearly living at the very edge of his sanity. As one man falls apart in front of him at the feet of his accusers, who are having him put to death, so does Mansour begin to fall apart at the prospect of living another day. At the end of his tether, he simply wants it to be over. He has swung from horror at the thought of being hung to horror at the thought of not being hung, and being led out to the gallows yet another time, not knowing whether he will do the air dance or get blue-balled back to his cell.
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As for his family, they make the trek out from their village, where they were forced to move back to after Mansour’s incarceration, even though Mansour shuns them and tells them not to visit. They are just as fractured as he is, needing to see their son/husband, but also wanting the ordeal to be over just as much…even if that means Mansour’s death. Things improve a bit between them when Mansour’s son is born, but there is really only so much ground that can be gained with such a large, fire-breathing dragon standing between the two factions.
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As I mentioned, Day Break is a rather sensitive film, much more so than I would have thought. I thought it would be more of an indictment of Islamic law, but we never actually see an execution. The warden beseeches the family of one man to forgive, several times, and they end up relenting and making the man instead donate the sale of his home to charity. Also, the inmates we see are all very supportive of each other. Hell, a guard Mansour decks goes out and has a smoke with him later. The big happy family thing and the benevolent warden felt a bit unreal, but like I said earlier, I have no frame of reference for judging truths about Iranian culture, so I’ll just have to let that one go.
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There is also a strong locomotion theme in the film. We get several flashbacks to Mansour as a small boy, riding a train. Of three dreams he has about his wife, two involve trains: in one, she is wearing white, like an angel, and is herself riding on the front of a train; in the second, she is wearing black, clearly ravaged by some disease, and holds herself up against a dilapidated train car as she ostensibly miscarries; the third has no train, but to complete the color motif she is wearing fire-engine red.
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Ultimately I enjoyed Day Break, as much for what I did not understand about it as for what I did. Even its frustrating ending felt satisfying, in a strange way. I always enjoy a peek into another culture, and you’ll find few as alien to the US way of life than one from the cradle of civilization.
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