hello all... i forgot to ask what everyone thought about the addition of the APDFB story to Pari....and the alterations made to the movie (both cultural and plot-based)...so i thought i'd post for everyone what i do know about it... which came from an internet movie source... but you probably already know all this... 'and if i belong then i'll be longer than expected'---low ..............amBen Pari (1995) Iran 1995 Color Language: Farsi Runtime: 115 Directed by: Dariush Mehrjui Cast (in alphabetical order) Niki Karimi....Pari Khosro Shakibai....Khosro Shakibai Written by: Dariush Mehrjui, J.D. Salinger (novel Franny and Zooey) Cinematography by: Ali Reza Zarrindast Music by: Keivan Jahanshahi Film Editing by: Hassan Hassandust Produced by: Dariush Mehrjui, Hashem Seifi Other crew: Abdollah Eskandari....make-up Majid Eskandari....make-up Faryar Javaherian....set designer Sasan Nakhaf....sound recordist Asghar Shahverdi....sound recordist Reza Sharafoddin....special effects ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ eye WEEKLY February 1 1996 Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ONSCREEN review PARI Starring Niki Karimi and Khosro Shakibai. Screenplay by Dariush Mahrjui based on J.D. Salinger's novel Franny And Zooey. Directed by Dariush Mahrjui. Arabic with Subtitles. (STC) Feb. 2, 9 p.m.; Feb. 4, 7 p.m.; Feb. 6, 9 p.m. (Part of the Second Iranian Film Festival, Feb. 2-7.) Bloor Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W. 532-6677. by CAROLYN BENNETT A chance to see a festival of Iranian films doesn't come around every day. In fact, the last one was six long years ago. If Pari, an intellectually ambitious work about a young woman's quest for life's meaning -- based on J.D. Salinger's novel Franny And Zooey -- is an indication, the festival is well worth your while. Pari is a young Iranian woman who has given up a fledgling acting career in search of The Big Answer. Through her studies she stumbles upon "The Green Book," a sort of how-to spiritual guide written by a fifth-century Jojira mystic. She becomes obsessed by the book, experiencing fantastic visions and religious ecstasy. The book was a gift from a beloved older brother who committed suicide in a fire and Pari seems set on following his fate. The bulk of the story lies with Pari's surviving brother, Dadashi, who takes it upon himself to bring Pari back to reality. Beautifully photographed and slickly directed (the film won veteran writer/director Dariush Mahrjui, a UCLA philosophy grad, the Best Director award at the 1995 Fajr Film Festival and Alireza Zarrindast the award for Best Cinematography), Pari is a stunning visual journey as well as a refreshingly intelligent story. Characters debate religion and philosophy. They get bent out of shape over bad art. They recognize and care about the state of thought in society. What is doubly compelling is that this philosophical and religious struggle comes from an Islamic perspective and not the Christian view, as in Franny And Zooey. The family dynamic, although a bit confusing at times, slowly reveals its significance by the end of the film, as a small revelation brings the mystical and temporal together. You may lose track of time watching Pari. There are no Hollywood plot points every 20 minutes, no twists that spin the action around. What you will do is revel in the beauty of the land and appreciate another culture's religious and intellectual tradition -- even if you don't completely understand it. Salinger As a House On Fire East Meets Upper East Side in an Iranian Adaptation of Franny and Zooey Niki Karimi, Pharsi Franny By Adam Pincus There are lots of ways a film can connect with its audience, and PARI, a high-pitched, elliptical tale of family dysfunction (to invoke distinctly Western terminology), obsession and spiritual questing, gets over on the strength of some unlikely dramatic elements. For the American audience, PARI is helped in no small part by the resonance of its source material. It is, without any apparent hint of irony, a literal adaptation of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Salinger's Glass family is a ruptured clan of New York intellectuals, with Ivy League genes and a sprawling, decayed Upper East side flat. The youngest Glass generation -- the naturally talented, impossibly likable Zooey and his more fretful kid sister Franny -- live in the long shadow of their brilliant older brothers, Seymour (a honeymoon suicide) and Buddy, a underachieving writer/professor at a small Eastern College. Weaned on Buddhism and the Life of Mind, Franny and Zooey feel somehow tainted by this melancholy intellectualism. Now young adults, they can't help believing they've been raised as "freaks," removed from the carefree bluster of their smart-talking, self-serious peers and the dew-eyed sentimentality of their mother and father. Not that they escaped either self-seriousness or sentimentality themselves; Franny has recently discovered a religious text which acts on her striving, hungry psyche like mystic pollution, and Zooey -- an actor and weary veteran of the Quest trenches -- vacillates between jokesterism and zealous disbelief. Both of them wish more than anything that they could just talk to Seymour about all this. The elder brothers' room, littered with all manner of high-minded detritus, remains untouched at the end of the hall, like a shrine. For all Salinger's earnest faith in the Buddhist solution, Franny and Zooey's talk of Bodhi somehow comes out wistful, esoteric and soft. They are '50's kids, trying on exotic garb. There's a gentle humor and a fondness for the characters and their yearnings, their crises, their illusions and disillusionment. What a difference forty-odd years and one radical cultural transposition make. The Iranian rendering of Salinger's characters might be recognizable to someone intimately familiar with the stories, but it's wholly inverted in tone and temperament. The opening half-hour -- that devoted to the Pharsi Franny, here called Pari -- is overwhelmingly strident and hysterical, as Pari pours forth all her feverish disquiet to her smug, self-absorbed and thoroughly baffled boyfriend.Looking around the Hawaii Theater, where most of the audience probably has little awareness of this film's adapted source, you've got to wonder: do they have any idea what's going on here? Can this film work on it own? In some ways, it can. PARI makes the most of the beauty of its star, Niki Karimi, whose luminous face projects all the youthful intensity and determined questing of her character. Khosro Shakibai, the AK 47 toting Zooey, who glides between bruising dogma and mischief, brings some of Salinger's sly humor back to the film. It comes as welcome relief. The scenes between Shakibai and his mother perhaps come closest to the spirit of the original, and the shift in tone helps give the film some balance. Writer/director Darkish Mehrjui has chosen to incorporate another Salinger Glass family story, "A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish" into PARI, and the scenes of Seymour's suicide -- seen once in flashback and again in a non-linear episode -- give a little dramatic heft to an otherwise talky, abstract film. But in PARI, the quiet suicide of a intellectual melancholic is again given a spin that is both more fierce, visual and visceral, and less in keeping with the author's tone of gentle desperation. Assad (Seymour) dowses himself in gasoline, lies down placidly on his bed and immolates himself. It's a transposition that best sums up what's both interesting and overwhelming about this film: the heat is there, but it's too often a scorcher. Niki, who took the Best Actress prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, translated the Salinger stories into Pharsi. "He has something in common with Herman Hesse," she said. "They are both interested in human beings more than story." So too PARI. Essential a portrait of youth in search of meaning and identity beyond the sometimes suffocating confines of family, PARI pays less attention to narrative drive, and so frequently bogs down in circular philosophical conundra that, for two hours, can have the same effect as a late-night college bull session. And nobody thinks that's all that interesting.