A political film seething with white-hot anger, “A Man of Integrity” has a premise that might work dramatically in numerous other contexts. You can imagine it in a classic Western, with a young soil-tiller (played by Jimmy Stewart, no doubt) facing off against ruthless cattle barons and their bought-and-paid-for constabulary. Or informing a Dashiell Hammett novel about a Depression-era union organizer battling the company goons and hired politicians of a powerful mining magnate. More recently, and from an international perspective, the premise has obviously similarities to that of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan” (2014), a scathing, allegorical indictment of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Like its Russian counterpart, the Iranian film puts its maker at odds with an authoritarian regime that doesn’t take kindly to critiques of its power. But the official opposition Rasoulof has faced in recent years, and continues to face, only underscores the daring and importance of his work, as it does that of his somewhat better-known compatriot Jafar Panahi. Involved in the protests against the so-called “stolen” presidential election that returned to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power in 2009, Panahi and Rasoulof were arrested, imprisoned, put on trial, and given draconian sentences that included not making films for extended periods of time. Yet, in a way that illustrates the paradoxes and absurdities of life in artistic Iran, the filmmakers have simply gone on practicing their craft, making films without official sanction that invariably are banned in Iran but smuggled out to appreciative audiences at international festivals and arthouses.
While Panahi’s four features since 2010, which star the director himself, are often comic in tone, Rasoulof’s four—“A Man of Integrity” (2017) is the third, though its U.S. release follows that of “There Is No Evil” (2020)—are deadly serious dramas that target particularly troubling aspects of Iranian society. One remarkable quality they share is that, for films regarded as “underground” due to the low-budget, off-the-grid way they are made, they come across as polished, often quite expansive productions. “A Man of Integrity” certainly fits this description. Though evidently filmed far from the eyes of Tehran’s cinema police, in the part of northern Iran where the story is set, it contains a large cast of characters and ranges across a wide array of rural and urban settings, which are handsomely rendered thanks to Ashkan Ashkani’s cinematography and Saeed Asadi’s production and costume design.
