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Good movie but grossly overrated

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

A Moment of Innocence, or The Bread and the Flower Pot, closely recalls fellow Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up, which also sough to recapture real life with its own dramatic conviction. In his own retelling of the story of a politically charged attempt to disarm and take a policeman's gun in his youth, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has created something so unique and so layered that it at first baffles the mind. Makhmalbaf wields the camera with an intent to retell faithfully and truthfully, in true Cinéma vérité style - his stylistic choices represent a documentary that cannot tell lies, and yet it becomes increasingly unreliable. In once scene, he converses with the young actor who will play him in the car in long take, talking about everything from future ambitions to romantic crushes, and it puts on a mask of genuineness. They approach his cousin's household to ask if her daughter will play a part in the film. As the girl goes to serve tea to the young actor, she suddenly whispers to him as if he has Mohsen himself, and they are planning the events that will lead to the fateful stabbing. It has suddenly becomes a moment of artifice without any stylistic or directorial indication. Another technique that Makhmalbaf plays with is one that Kiarostami also used in his 1999 film, The Wind Will Carry Us. While the camera films in wide shot and the characters walk further and further away, the sound levels do not adjust accordingly and realistically, but remain in our ears, as if they were right here next to us. Such a technique throws our objectivity up into the air; surely this must have been dubbed later? And near the end of the film Makhmalbaf will slowly add a musical soundtrack to dramatise the climatic encounter, and replace the still long takes with more dynamic follow shots and closeups. One thing that remains abundantly clear however is the amateur nature of the young actors.This tension is what makes the film tick. You see, both Makhmalbaf and the policeman seem to have entirely different accounts of what happened 20 years ago, and slowly they begin to realise this as they are in the process of recapturing those events. The policeman wants a tall, handsome young actor to portray him, and sulks when he does not get his way. He vigorously coaches the kid on how to properly play himself, and freely interrupts the filming process to criticise and adjust (and Makhmalbaf also freely layers perspectives of the camera onto each other). And yet, the artifice does shine through. Twice, the policeman storms off, the second after that tumultuous discovery that the 20 years of longing for the girl had been all for nothing, a lie to keep him awake. Makhmalbaf does not attempt to document these emotions in closeup, yet he is also eager to use the soundtrack to imitate the reaction. And he does not relent when he has the actors right in front of him; the policeman feigning suicidal thoughts after the discovery, and the young Mohsen breaking into tears and refusing to commit the violence of the past.This becomes the key to that breathtaking final freeze frame. Makhmalbaf seeks to recreate the truth, but has become aware of the impossibility of filming an objective, unbiased version of the past. That politically charged activist youth is no more, and the post-revolution mindset becomes clear in the young actor's ideals of saving mankind, but not through violence. And in the young policeman, who does not want to wield the gun to shoot, even if both are just artificial constructs. So they instead offer the bread and the flower pot, a symbolic blossoming of the new generation, and a testament to the ability of film to be able to reconcile and transform the reality of these weary old men.

It is true that from a purely technical perspective, the freeze frame at the end of this film is quite revolutionary. A lot of viewers have expressed some positive comments about it. Hence, it would not be an understatement to call it one of the best moments in the history of cinema. However, Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf goes much more beyond this accomplishment as 'A moment of innocence' attempts to recreate an important event of the past in present times for future generations using existential themes and film making process. As a young man, while protesting against Shah's regime, director Mohsen Makhmalbaf had stabbed a police man. Although he chose an autobiographical episode which occurred many years ago, there has been no attempt made by Makhmalbaf to glorify neither violence nor revolutionary ideology. It appears as if everybody has become more compassionate including the young actor chosen to represent Makhmalbaf. This pacifist strategy brings everybody connected to the film to the conclusion that violence is no solution if the world needs to be changed. It is only through love can somebody aspire to change the world.

Despite its technical flaws here and there, due to the (in)capabilities under which Iran filmmakers have to work -as I'm told-, it would not be an exaggeration to name this film one of the best of all times.While reflecting or hinting at several 'layers' of personal and social conflicts and dilemmas roaming the daily lives of the youth and eld, native and universal, of the present and the past as well with a striking and effective language; at the same time it makes the viewer laugh one's guts out with the natural and fluent comedy. I daresay Chaplin style.(Spoiler ahead) Aside from the magnificent bread and flower moment at the end, one of the best scenes is when the girl rushes into a watch repairer's shop filled up with hundreds of watches and clocks, asks the time and is answered "I don't know, these are all broken, we repair them here!" (Paraphrased.)Don't miss it.

The Iranian cinema is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all national cinemas. Though it owes much to the development of Italian neo-realism, the Iranian cinema today is not just an extension of its predecessor's concerns about cinematic truth but a formal inquiry of the nature of cinema and the "truth" that lies within and outside of art. Jacques Rivette's groundbreaking "L'amour fou" already sets the stage in 1968 when he investigated the symbiotic relationship betwen art and life by using two different film stocks, 16 and 35 mm., to represent "reality" as it unfolds in front and behind the camera respectively.In Moshen Makhmalbaf's 1996 masterpiece "A Moment of Innocence" twenty years separates a key moment in time and the recreation of it. The incident occurred when Makhmalbaf was only a youth who participated in an anti-Shah demonstration which led to the stabbing of a policeman and his imprisonment for the next five years. In an attempt to recapture this moment Makhmalbaf decides to a make a film within a film casting all the original participants (including the policeman) to play themselves as mentors to their younger selves, (i.e., actors) guiding and instructing them in the making of this "fictional" documentary.It is not surprising that non-professional actors are employed here to both maintain a semblance of reality and to keep cinematic distortion at bay. But paradoxically, the young non-professional actors chosen to play Makhmalbaf and the policeman of their youth are as similar as they are dissimilar from their counterparts, thus, setting the stage for exploring the many tensions that exist between past and present, art and life, cinema and reality. This type of casting not only blurs the line between fiction and reality but also the distinction between documentary and narrative filmmaking.The preoccupation with the phenomenological aspects of the cinema is as much the focus of this work as is the dramatization of the event leading up to the pivotal moment, then and now, reconstructed as a memory film as well as a product of the filmmaker's imagination to help correct an incident that only becomes clear to everyone involved after twenty years have elapsed. This celebrated moment which occurs at the end of film effectively captures the past by placing it in the present context much as if past and present suddenly converge and share the same space and time, thereby allowing us to see loss and recovery unfold simultaneously. That lost moment is now regained twenty years later through art's ability to heal and transform Makhmalbaf and his crew--thus altering the "reality" of life. The final shot is both life-affirming and referential because it so eloquently evokes the cinema's first prominent use of the freeze frame in Truffaut's "400 Blows"--if only to remind us just how far the cinema has come along. Like Truffaut's autobiographical based character Antoine Doinel the cinema has indeed grown up.