Café Transit - Movie Review
Genre: Drama; Country: Iran; Language: Greek, Persian, Turkish; Runtime: 105 min
Also Known As: Border Café in English
Trivia: Selected as Iran’s submission in the Best Foreign Film category for the 2006 Oscars
Directed by: Kambuzia Partovi
Story of an Iranian widow’s struggle to exercise the fundamental right of living with freedom the life of her choice. Reyhan with her two children, how she fights the male dominated society is the heart of the story.
Nasser the brother of her deceased husband wishes to marry Reyhan. Taking Iran’s tradition as the main weapon and with the support of his family, applies pressure on her to be his wife. Reyhan chooses to decline the marriage offer softly but stubbornly without much of a hue and cry.
For her daily bread, she choses to reopen the cafe which is situated in the border of Iran. It is not customary for a women to run a cafe in that part of the world. Cafe’s business is targetted towards the truckkers who travel in the highways crossing the borders. Nasser owns a similar but larger cafe away from hers, towards the city.
She runs the Cafe effectively and it outshones Nasser’s business gradually. In a parallel line, a Greek driver who passes by regularly starts liking Reyhan. She also gives refuge to a Russian girl, who has lost her family. In order to rebuild his businees and to make Reyhan dependent on him, Nasser forces her to close the cafe with the help of Iranian law.
After the cafe is closed, whether Reyhan succumbs to the pressure of Nasser? or she marries the Greek? or she chooses to live on her own is the story.
Fereshteh Sadr Orfani is the real life wife of Partovi the director and is outstanding in performance as Reyhan. Actors show their experience with depthful acting. The scenes and screenplay is very simple and with clarity. The dialogues are straight forward which clearly identifies the character. Photograpy and art direction is good. Each and every frame gets registered as a beautiful poem. The food making skills and presentation of Reyhan’s gives a feel to taste it and is wonderfully taken to the audience.
As a symbol of sorrow and widowness Reyhan wears only black dress. When she gets comfortable with the Greek, she removes the black dress and sees her face in mirror. The scene was scintillating. This scene, shows that Reyhan falls in love with the Greek, but at the climax the charcter gets confused and chooses not to marry the Greek. If the decision was other way round, it can be hailed as a great movie with good social concepts too. But the director chooses to make the lead character Reyhan dumb by making her not to marry Greek. This can be taken as a black spot in the movie.
On the whole a must watch movie for movie lovers.
For detail on movie see the IMDB web page http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0477585/