The Cycle

A surprisingly eloquent piece of poetic neo-realism. A young man accompanies his dour old father to hospital in Tehran; while waiting there, both become enmeshed in the corrupt business cycle which surrounds it. It's arty but articulate, a social allegory in which the hospital's contaminated blood supply poisons exactly those people (the urban poor) who are also its desperate donors. This cyclical logic of exploitation unfortunately yields moral rather than political conclusions, and produces some heavy-handed thematic oppositions - honesty versus corruption, country versus city. But with its overwhelming intuitions of visual truth (the luminous hospital, the dusty waste of an industrial hinterland), the central drama of lost hope and tyrannical poverty in the Shah's 'free' market state retains considerable force; you can see why it was banned for three years.