Gholam review – Shahab Hosseini mesmerises as Iranian exile in London

An Iranian London minicab driver is caught between two worlds in Mitra Tabrizian’s striking feature debutThis haunting debut feature from photographer and film-maker Mitra Tabrizian is set amid London’s Iranian community during the Arab spring of 2011.

Centring on a melancholy figure caught between his former home and his current lonely life, it’s an arresting portrait of displaced struggles that moves almost inexorably from observational drama to eerie quasi-thriller.

At its heart is a mesmerising (and often wordless) performance by Shahab Hosseini, who proved so magnetic in Asghar Farhadi’s 2017 Oscar-winner The Salesman.

Adept at conveying weighty emotional conflicts through minimal physical gestures (his kind but careworn face speaks a thousand words), Hosseini holds the audience’s attention as Tabrizian’s elliptical, diasporic drama unfolds mysteriously around him.There’s a distant echo of Robert De Niro in Hosseini’s Gholam, a nocturnal minicab driver whose variously

Read full article


Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *