They came for him in the early morning. Newsweek’s Maziar Bahari, a Canadian reporter who grew up in Iran, was sleeping in his mother’s house after covering the country’s contested 2009 presidential election and its violent aftermath. “Get up, sir. Get dressed. We are here now,” the secret policeman insisted with firm patience allowing for no dispute. The detectives searched his room and found all sorts of incriminating evidence. A “Sopranos” DVD? “Pornography,” the police declared. A Leonard Cohen CD? “Jewish pornography.” But possession of suspicious music and movies wasn’t the reason he was taken into custody. Bahari was charged with espionage—for the CIA, MI6, the Mossad, whoever? The details mattered less than the big picture the regime was trying to paint.
Bahari’s plight drew international attention and is dramatized in the directorial debut by Jon Stewart. Based on Bahari’s memoir, Rosewater’s title refers to the rosewater cologne worn by his interrogator, a sweet contrast to the bitterness of hard imprisonment. Stewart’s interest in the story stems from a connection with the imprisoned journalist. Apparently, Bahari’s interview on the “Daily Show” caught the eye of the country’s counterintelligence. The humor of the episode escaped them.
Gael García Bernal plays Bahari with natural grace and an easy smile. He laughs at his captors at first, until the terrible reality of his captivity takes hold. Bahari is confined in a cement cell and subsists on bug-infested rations. His father had also been held at Tehran’s dreaded Evin Prison by the Shah’s secret police. His ghost debates with his son, telling him to buck up and criticizing him as weak for even considering signing the confession the interrogator has prepared. The elder Bahari had been a Communist Party member and the son shoots back that the Leninism that sustained him in prison was a lie that supported the Stalinists whose brutality exceeded the Shah’s.
Rosewater investigates the psychology of the captors as well as the captives. Bahari’s interrogator rations the physical brutality. As his father’s ghost reminds him, the young journalist has it good compared to most prisoners. Bahari was, however, subjected to psychological abuse designed to undermine his will to endure. “You must take away his hope,” the interrogator’s boss counsels. Bahari’s tormentor has his story too: He was tortured by the Shah’s men and is now a frustrated careerist, hoping for a promotion if he extracts a convincing confession from his star prisoner.
Did his captors really believe that a Newsweek correspondent was a Western spy? The chief interrogator reminds Bahari of his country’s history in the 1950s, when the CIA overthrew a democratically elected government with the help of journalists, local and foreign, who helped shape public perceptions of the coup. Iran’s theocrats had reason to suspect the worst from Western media even as they stole their country’s election from the voters and cracked down hard on the protests that followed.
Nuanced and often visually imaginative, with a vivid sense of place in its recreation of crowded Tehran, Rosewater puts a human face on the repression meted out by the Iranian regime against dissent.
