Baradaran-e Leila (2022)

Underwhelming and bloated out of proportion

Saeed Roostaie's third feature, seems like a weak and bloated amalgamation of what he had made before. A pivotal scene of the movie is taken straight out of his short film "marasem", and feels like a tired and second degree rehashing of the same scenario. There are several extremely long and exhausting scenes between Leila and her younger brother played by navid mohammadzadeh , on the rooftop and in the hospital, which add nothing to the story and are there only to spout out beautiful seeming surface level dialogue, which tank the pacing of the movie in company with how poorly and haphazardly they're shot and edited. The plot gives you little to no reason to invest in the characters, as they have literary no good traits or interesting back stories. The characters, brothers and sisters, take long pauses to explain to each other how larger family dynamics work, and how their father behaves, as if they're newly introduced to their father just like the audiences; that is expository dialogue at its worst. And then there are scene that belong only to a TV melodrama or a commercial; a brother looking at his ex-girlfriend living across the street with repetitious back and forth looks that resemble soap operas at their worst. A scene that's put there for no other reason than cashing in on it in one of last scenes of the movie where the brother exclaims "I'm fearful of anything good happening", which falls flat, packing no emotional truth behind it, as we have never seen him self-sabotage and only seen him self preserve no matter the financial cost to himself or others. And then there is the ice cream eating scene which is an abomination. The same goes for the nod to the Godfather's last shot, which takes place early in the film; it's flat, empty and ridiculous to the point of being comic.

All and all, Leila's brothers is a work of hubris run a mock. It's exhaustingly long, it's laborious to get through, and it gives it's characters nothing to like about, forcing you to root for them out of goodness of your heart, not because the characters deserve a good outcome. I hope the filmmaker takes himself out of this pit of misery that he has dug himself into, gives the characters in his next movies other traits than what terrible things have happened to them, and takes more interest in creating more visual intrigue and suspenseful engagement in his audience.