Dariush Mehrjui (1939-2023), writer, screenwriter, musician, translator, painter, producer, prominent director, and, in fact, the preeminent symbol of the Iranian New Wave cinema, was murdered, along with his screenwriter wife, Vahideh Mohammadi-Far (1968-2023), at their residence in the city of Fardis, Karaj, on Saturday, October 14, 2023. Mehrjui was 84 years old.
Perhaps before speaking about Mehrjui, it would not be inappropriate to first mention Ms. Mohammadi-Far, a screenwriter, costume designer, and graduate in psychology from the University of Tehran. She married Mehrjui in 1996, and the result of their union was a sixteen-year-old daughter named Mona. Mohammadi-Far began her cinematic career by acting in the film Leila (1996), and ultimately co-wrote eight screenplays with Dariush Mehrjui, including Bemani (2001) and Santouri (2007).
Childhood and Adolescence
To gain a deeper and better understanding of Mehrjui, one must examine his childhood and family background, which will help in comprehending his journey toward philosophy and the formation of thought in his cinema.
He was born into a middle-class family in the south of Tehran on December 8, 1939. His father, a high school graduate, was traditional and patriarchal, to the extent that, after his eldest daughter completed the seventh grade, demonstrating both considerable talent for and interest in studying, he forbade her from continuing her education.
Mehrjui says:
“My father was an accountant at a company and worked in the bazaar. Our house was in the Dabbagh Khaneh/Shapour neighborhood of Tehran. Since childhood, I was engaged in artistic activities: I painted, drew miniatures, played the tar (a Persian string instrument), and was very interested in music. My father had a large santur (another Persian musical instrument) at home and was very fond of music. He wanted to see if I had the talent to play an instrument.”
He continues:
“From the second grade of elementary school, at the age of seven or eight, I attended music classes with Mr. Zandi and started learning the santur. My talent was exceptional. My primary interest was initially in music—I wanted to compose and become an orchestra conductor. But then I realized that the circumstances were not favorable.”
(Video interview with Bahman Maghsoudlou, Tehran, July 2002).
From childhood, he read novels. He and his sister would rent books to read together. The works of Balzac, Victor Hugo (Les Misérables), Anatole France, Alexandre Dumas, and Hossein Gholi Mosta’an were among them.
Mehrjui has also spoken about his views on religion and God, explaining how he began to doubt:
“My grandmother was very religious, and because of the environment I was raised in, I became a devout and pious person who prayed regularly. But around the ages of 12-13, doubts started creeping into my heart. It was strange—I realized that God was not as I had imagined, and then I was desperately searching for a book that would dispel my doubts. From that age, fundamental questions arose in my mind, and I lost my faith.” (Same source)
Regarding his interest in cinema:
“My sister and I used to go to the Jahan Cinema. I remember the Hansaye Arab films and the Lone Ranger series. At the summer theater of Mihan Cinema in Hassan Abad Square, I also watched Charlie Chaplin films. But my first love was music, and we didn’t have a piano at home.” (Same source)
Eventually, the cinema overshadowed music. He explains how this came about:
“My entry into cinema was through making a projector because I was in love with cinema and dreamed of building a projector myself. I put in a lot of effort to construct the main body of it, but it lacked the essential mechanism to run film at 24 frames per second. We had a neighbor who was an engineer. He built that special device for us, and then we installed it on the projector. One day, I finally sold tickets and invited all the neighborhood kids. They came in, sat down, and we rented a reel of film, placed it on the projector, and started screening it. But we had forgotten to put the lower reel in place—so as the film ran, it just spilled onto the floor, creating a huge pile.”
He continues:
“Later, we attended Dr. Kavousi’s sessions at the Cinema Club and realized how profound and rich cinema could be. I saw that literature, music, and painting were all present in this medium. I would read Setareh Cinema magazine and various film articles every week. I searched for English books, borrowed them from the Iran-America Association, and read them with a dictionary. At one of the festivals that Mr. Ashtiani organized at Sadi Cinema, I watched a series of foreign films that completely amazed me.” (Same source)
This interest led to his developing a strong command of the English language. At the age of nineteen, he went to the United States and was admitted to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to study cinema and theater.
He further states:
“When I was in America, it was the early 1960s. […] My misfortune was that I was in the center of Hollywood and looking for a mentor to follow, but there was no one. The best figure around at that time was Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood. […] On the other hand, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman had emerged. It was a very rich panorama. Although I took a Working with Actors course with Jean Renoir, which was very useful, I realized that the depth of all these works lay in philosophy.” (Same source)
Thus, his inquisitive mind led him to study philosophy, and, in 1965, he graduated in this field. He says:
“That is, any artistic work, if it does not have intellectual depth behind it, will turn out to be shallow and one-dimensional. So, philosophy is important.” (Same source)
Despite his turn towards film, Mehrjui never completely abandoned his interest in music. As well as playing the piano well, he was also a skilled santur player and possessed an excellent knowledge of classical music. During his student years, he played the santur in Hormoz Farhat’s music group—Farhat, at that time, being the professor of Eastern music at UCLA. Consequently, in most of his works, the santur plays an important role, for instance, its performance in key scenes in The Cow, as well as in Santouri and many others.
In his final year at the university, he wrote the script Shirin and Farhad, which caught the attention of an American producer. However, the producer wanted to collaborate with a partner in Iran to make the film. As a result, Mehrjui, along with Mostafa Alemian (who had graduated in cinematography from UCLA), hopefully returned to Iran. But no studio was willing to invest in telling this story. Mehrdad Pahlbod, the Minister of Culture and Art at the time, dismissed their hopes by saying:
“How can it be possible, in a love triangle where the king and queen are at the top, for another man to be with the queen?”
Pre-Revolution Films: ِDiamond 33
Amid such disappointments, Reza Fazeli, an actor and director of Iranian cinema, approached Mehrjui and proposed that he turn a screenplay written by Kazem Salahshour—based on a James Bond-style story—into a film. The script was about a man who claimed to have discovered the formula for making diamonds from oil.
Although Mehrjui was not initially inclined to make such films, he saw this as an opportunity to apply everything he had learned about cinema at the university in a satirical way and experiment with it.
For color cinematography, he selected Mostafa Alemian, and for the cast, in addition to Reza Fazeli, he chose Nancy Kovack, an American actress whom Mehrjui knew from UCLA. The film was produced over the course of a year by Nosratollah Montakhab and Reza Fazeli.
The film, titled Diamond 33, was made in Technicolor and Techniscope and had a runtime of 140 minutes. It was released on January 24, 1968, at the Plaza Cinema and several other theaters.
The film, which had been produced with a budget of over two million tomans and was released a year after the extraordinary commercial success of Ganj-e Qarun (a 1965 comedy-drama by Siamak Yasami), attempted to be a humorous and action-packed spectacle in the James Bond style. However, despite some entertaining scenes, it only managed to earn around eight hundred thousand tomans, thus failing both commercially and artistically.
Nevertheless, making Diamond 33 provided Mehrjui with valuable experience, as it allowed him to familiarize himself with all aspects and elements of filmmaking in practice.
The Cow
During his university years, Dariush Mehrjui became acquainted with the works of Dr. Gholamhossein Saedi. His mother used to buy Saedi’s books and send them to him. Mehrjui had even translated and published some of Saedi’s works in a magazine called Pars Review, which he himself edited in Los Angeles, even sending a copy to Saedi. Upon his return to Iran, he met Saedi several times in that first year.
Eventually, after the completion of Diamond 33, one day, Mehrjui happened to meet Saedi on the street.
During their conversation, Saedi suggested The Cow, a story from his book The Mourners of Bayal. The play The Cow, featuring performances by Ezzatollah Entezami, Ali Nassirian, Jafar Vali, and other actors from the Theater Administration (affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Art), had been staged live on television on May 19, 1965, and received great attention.
That very night, Mehrjui read the book, liked it, and decided to turn it into a film.
For two weeks, every night, Mehrjui and Saedi worked on the screenplay in Dr. Saedi’s office on Delgosha Street in Tehran until they had a finalized script.
The Screenplay
The Mourners of Bayal is a collection of eight stories, and Mehrjui chose the fourth story for his second film. However, the reality was that this 28-page story was more suitable for a short film, so it was necessary for Mehrjui to make fundamental changes not only to the structure but also to the content, adding additional segments.
To address this issue, he borrowed elements from other stories in The Mourners of Bayal, strengthening the screenplay and expanding it. Through careful selection and intelligent cinematic changes, he transformed the story into an extraordinary screenplay that laid the foundation for one of the masterpieces of Iranian and world cinema.
Here are some examples of the modifications and adaptations made:
- The fourth story of The Mourners of Bayal begins with the wailing and lamenting of Mashdi Touba, Mash Hassan’s wife, announcing the sudden death of his cow in his absence (Gholamhossein Saedi, The Mourners of Bayal, Negah Publishing, Tehran, 2008, pp. 99 & 89). Mehrjui, with extraordinary insight, alters the structure of the story. He introduces an emotional, mystical relationship between Mash Hassan and his cow and postpones the cow’s death to the later part of the film, making it the dramatic climax.
- The economic importance of the cow and the vital role of its milk for the villagers do not exist in Saedi’s original story. In the story, the villagers are only concerned with their own affairs, and there is no emphasis on the cow’s milk. However, Mehrjui skillfully brings this element into the film, depicting how the villagers rely on Mash Hassan’s cow for their milk supply. In one scene, when Mash Hassan returns from the fields with his cow, many women stand outside his house with bowls, waiting for milk.
- The mourning ritual and prayer ceremony for Mash Hassan, accompanied by banners and led by two elderly women, Naneh Fatemeh and Naneh Khanom, is adapted from the third story in the book (pp. 76 & 87) and incorporated into the screenplay.
- The subplot involving the theft of Mash Jabar’s sheep by the Boluris, which is shown at the beginning of the film, is taken from the third story in the book and integrated into the screenplay.
- Certain characteristics and actions of “Mo Sorkhe,” such as playing with a bucket full of mice, are borrowed from the seventh story in the book (pp. 167-166).
- To establish the emotional and deep connection between Mash Hassan and his cow, Mehrjui not only merges two images in the film’s opening credits to create a visual overlap but also uses various shots in the cow-washing scene to subtly highlight their bond.
- Although Saedi’s writing style was predominantly realistic and avoided depicting the characters’ internal psychological worlds, this gap is filled by Mehrjui’s philosophical and contemplative vision.
- Mehrjui achieves two significant things in the screenplay for The Cow: first, he makes the cow the central element of the story, and second, he attributes economic value to the milking cow, which, as mentioned, is absent in Saedi’s original story.
- Mash Hassan’s obsessive love for his cow sets him apart from the other villagers, making him a unique figure whose fate ultimately leads to his tragic demise.
This obsessive attachment is also hinted at in the original story. For example, Esmail, Mash Hassan’s brother-in-law, tells Abbas’s sister, whom he loves:
“I know Mash Hassan loves his cow more than he loves my sister.” (p. 105)
Production of The Cow
Mehrjui made a wise decision to work with the same group of theater actors who had performed in The Cow on television. Mehrdad Pahlbod welcomed the proposal by Mehrjui and Saedi to produce the film, and the Ministry of Culture and Art and its affiliates became the film’s producers. Fereydoun Ghovanlou was selected as the cinematographer.
After extensive searching, the village of Boeing, located 30 kilometers along the Qazvin-Rasht Road, was chosen as the filming location.
Mehrjui says:
“Some officials from the ministry came and said that this village was too run-down. Then we cleaned it up ourselves and built a few small sets, like Esmail’s house, and then we dug the pond.” (Same source)
Filming began in Boeing village in the spring and summer of 1968 and was completed in the fall of the same year. Zari Khalaj, a graduate of the Dramatic Arts College, edited The Cow at the Ministry of Culture and Art over the course of two months, finishing the editing in March 1969. The film’s total cost was approximately 400,000 tomans.
To be continued….
