Iranian cinema seems to have this unequalled power to make its cultural specificities, if not universal, wholly compelling. Such a burdensome focus on concepts like honour has the very real potential to alienate the more informal viewers of the West, but the best tales of domestic strife from dramatists like Asghar Farhadi and Abbas Kiarostami prove gripping enough that the cultural barrier never hampers the tension of the dilemma. With Leila’s Brothers, Saeed Roustaee forcefully adds his name to the ranks of accomplished Iranian web-spinners worthy of such acclaim.

Comparisons between Leila’s Brothers and the films of Farhadi feel inevitable, if only because, even before accounting for the cultural specificities, Farhadi has made himself modern cinema’s premier name for domestic dramas (the star of Farhadi’s most famous film, A Separation, even appears here as one of the titular, show-stealing brothers). But while Farhadi focuses primarily on fractures of the marital variety, Roustaee here prefers to keep the head-spinning antics in the immediate family. What results from that choice is an incredibly engaging dynamic between Leila and her 4 male siblings, nearly all of whom (3/4 ain’t a bad average) make their presence immediately memorable and integral to the internalized narrative.

As Leila herself, Taraneh Alidoosti (a regular of Farhadi’s earlier works) explodes with proactive energy. Just as Leila is the backbone of this dysfunctional, impoverished family, Alidoosti is the backbone of Leila’s Brothers. The fact that the English title of the film is “Leila’s Brothers” and not “Leila and Her Brothers” should tell you all you need to know about the power this character has in the family dynamic, as should the fact that the ambition of the family’s father is to, quite literally, inherit the role of a formal patriarch. 

Though this may feel like obvious territory for a progressive Middle Eastern social drama, Saeed Roustaee circumvents possible clichés by transparently illustrating how Leila isn’t merely a faultless victim of the patriarchy. Of course, her perspective on the family’s financial woes is by far the most logical, but after enough time being the family’s backbone, when the final straw is placed thereupon, the snap is violent and, some might say, excessive. But such a reaction, after over two-and-a-half hours (and decades offscreen) of being treated like human pavement, feels uncomfortably inevitable. Tense, gripping and surprisingly funny, Leila’s Brothers feels poised to be this year’s runaway hit from the Cannes Film Festival.

2022 Ranked.

Cannes 2022.
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