Rosewater - film review

Beware of celebrity TV satirists turning to Serious Cinema. Jon Daily Show Stewart, long the best and funniest political commentator in the US media, turns first-time movie writer-director with this truth-based dramatisation of Iranian-born BBC reporter Maziar Bahari's arrest and imprisonment during Iran's anti-Ahmadi-Nejad 2009 election riots.

Worthiness threatens. Message-mongering menaces. But after some preludial earnestness and spell-it-out dialogue, the film gathers force, even wit. Gael Garcia Bernal (Bahari) and Kim Bodnia (Rosewater, his code-named prison interrogator) fall into a cat-and-mouse camaraderie, modulating between brutality and black humour. Outside jail the film doesn't quite know what to do with itself. Lumpy docudrama alternates with stylistic caprice: flashbacks projected on street fronts, visualised cyber-babble scattered across a cityscape. Inside jail it's a different, stronger, more purposefully quirky story.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation