A HERO: The Moral Compass of Asghar Farhadi

Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi is masterful at depicting the complexities of the human condition onscreen; his touch is subtle, helping him to avoid the ire of his country’s censors, yet his stories and his characters nonetheless linger with you, hovering like ghosts in the back of your mind long after you’ve finished watching one of his films. Farhadi’s latest, A Hero, once again returns to the themes of societal strife that have run through his previous films, including Academy Award-winners A Separation and The Salesman, to tell the story of a man imprisoned for his inability to repay a debt and the storm of public attention that ensues when he does a (seemingly) good deed. The film’s title is deceptively simple and thus perfectly articulates the drama at the center of the story, for what starts as a straightforward way for one man to clear his conscience rapidly spirals out of control into something far more complicated.

Two Roads Diverged

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) worked as a calligrapher painting signs and banners until printing technology put him out of a job. Determined to start a new business, he took out a substantial loan; when the business failed and his partner fled with the money, Rahim was sent to prison. Now out on a two-day leave to visit his family, Rahim is desperate to finally pay back the debt. And he thinks he has found a solution: his devoted girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust), has discovered a bag of gold coins abandoned at a bus stop.

Rahim quickly phones his creditor, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), with the good news. But soon, Rahim’s conscience gets the better of him, and instead of cashing in the coins, he reports the lost bag to the authorities. When a woman telephones the prison to claim it, the prison officials decide to exploit Rahim’s good deed for some much-needed good publicity. The situation rapidly snowballs into a public celebration of Rahim and his seemingly selfless decision to turn the money in instead of using it to free himself.

Yet, as always, with increased attention comes increased scrutiny. Did Rahim find the coins himself? If he only just found them on his leave, then why did Bahram receive a voice message a week before in which Rahim claimed to have a way to pay off his debt? Who is the woman who claimed the bag, and why can she not be found to back up Rahim’s story? All too quickly, Rahim’s so-called heroism begins to instead be viewed as a coverup for villainy—especially in the eyes of Bahram, who insists that Rahim is far less worthy of celebration than everyone else is choosing to believe.

The Truth Untold

As Farhadi shows us, easy labels like hero and villain are incapable of containing the multitudes inherent in any human being; he makes it clear that when the individuals involved fail to live up to the expectations implied in those labels, the blame should be directed towards the society that rushed to apply them in the first place. While the media, the prison officials, and Rahim would paint Bahram as the bad guy of A Hero, a stubborn and unsympathetic man who wants to throw Rahim back behind bars, Bahram’s own story is far different. He sacrificed his daughter’s dowry to provide Rahim with the loan, and until the debt is repaid, Bahram has nothing to provide for her future marriage. Why should he settle for this just because of Rahim’s good deed, he argues? Is he not also a victim of bad circumstances, like Rahim, if not more so?

Bahram’s version of events, in which Rahim is an impulsive and irresponsible man who cannot be trusted, is at first brushed aside by those who would prefer a feel-good story with no strings attached. And really, who wouldn’t? (One cannot help but recall the GoFundMe scandal involving a couple who raised thousands of dollars for a homeless veteran, only for it to be revealed that most of the money was spent on stuff like designer bags and a BMW.) But Rahim’s increasingly poor decisions—changing his story about who found the coins, asking Farkhondeh to masquerade as the owner of the bag when she cannot be found, trying to fight Bahram outside his place of business—show that nothing is ever so simple, no matter how much we might want to believe otherwise.

Over the course of A Hero, the audience goes from feeling hopeful and excited for Rahim to get his life back on track to being racked with anxiety and, later, disappointment. It’s an emotional rollercoaster of a film with every up and down made more gut-wrenching by Jadidi’s deeply sympathetic performance as a man who, underneath all of the secrets and self-sabotage, really does just want to do the right thing. With his big smile and gentle eyes, one empathizes with him so deeply that—like the charity administrators who later confront Rahim about the inconsistencies in his story—one feels almost personally betrayed when it all goes wrong. But isn’t that our own fault, for attempting to hold such an ordinary, imperfect man to such lofty standards? Wouldn’t the same thing probably happen to us in his situation, too?

The majority of the blame for Rahim’s plight belongs to the society that put him in such a desperate situation in the first place. This is personified by the cruel human resources director at the place where Rahim is recommended for a job that he hopes will help him pay off his debt to Bahram. It’s this hard-nosed bureaucrat’s refusal to trust Rahim, and his insistence on pulling every loose thread to see where it might lead, that results in the inevitable unraveling of Rahim’s story. That this character is the only one in A Hero to be painted in stark black and white, instead of the various shades of grey that are used to color everyone else, makes him appear a bit too cartoonish in his villainy; if Farhadi’s point is that people like Rahim and Bahram are far more complicated than such labels, why then have your story turn on the existence of another character that seems to prove otherwise? It’s a surprisingly heavy-handed move that feels out of place for Farhadi.

One of the key relationships throughout A Hero is that between Rahim and his young son (Saleh Karimai), who suffers from a severe stutter and can barely complete a sentence. Watching his son be trotted out in front of television cameras and forced to struggle through speeches about his wonderful father is a key driver in Rahim’s change in motivation throughout A Hero; he goes from merely wanting to pay off his debt to being obsessed with maintaining his honor. In one particularly painful scene towards the end of the film, a prison official tries to make Rahim’s son record a video for social media to help them all save face. Rahim’s inability to watch his son be exploited for his own sake leads him to explode in anger and kick the man out of his house; he sacrifices one last chance to preserve his story to instead save his son from further embarrassment. If that’s not truly being a hero, then what is?

Conclusion

Through Asghar Farhadi’s lens, all of our flaws are made visible—but that’s what makes his films, like A Hero, so powerful.

What do you think? Are you a fan of Asghar Farhadi’s previous films? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

A Hero is released in theaters in the U.S. on January 7, 2022. You can find more international release dates here.

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