The White Meadows
On my flight back from San Francisco, having watched the abysmal “Crazy Stupid Love” on the way there, I decided I couldn’t bear another hour of crap on the tiny screen in front of me. I was flying on Virgin, and if the night club ambience and other passengers hadn’t been enough to kill me, then a movie starring Justin Timberlake surely would have.
So I flipped through their foreign movie selection, and chose the one that looked the least unappealing. It was called “The White Meadows,” and it was made in 2009 by an Iranian filmmaker named Mohammad Rasoulouf, who has since been jailed for being a heretic, or something draconian like that. Through the lens of his camera, he managed to capture a movie so breathtakingly beautiful, that even on an airplane, I was transported into another world.
The film is about Rahmat, a man who travels around the salt-laden waters of some unnameable ocean, collecting the tears of the inhabitants of the islands that rise like sculptural masterpieces from the ocean floor. They are superstitious people who believe that life is governed by the gods of the elements, who take away when transgressed against, and give little else but slight reprieves in return.
In the course of the movie, Rahmat picks up a stowaway who pretends to be the dead corpse of the most beautiful woman in a town. Later, he saves him for being stoned after chasing the bridal pyre of another gorgeous child, cast out on waves adorned with burning lamps, to be the bride of the ocean. The lesson, of course, is that beauty is an aberration, and must be dispelled from the world.
He visits a town where he collects secrets whispered into glass jars, and fastened to the recently shorn body of a dwarf, who is cast down a well with them as the sun rises, gloriously, one morning. He saves a painter who refuses to admit that the sea is blue, instead painting it red, much to the dismay of the town’s elder, and the painter’s family. Proclaimed a dissident, he is forced to first look at the sun with salt soaked eyes, and then doused in monkey urine to clear his vision. When none of that works, he is cast out to sea with Rahmat, so that his “disease” does not contaminate other people. By this point, he has been completely blinded.
All the while, Rahmat meticulously captures the tears of the people he encounters with a small glass vial, taken from a worn leather doctor’s bag. When he has a few drops, he wipes their faces with a cloth, and then moves on to the next misery.
The movie is supposed to be an allegory about modern Iran—it’s rigid, illogical rules, the irrational punishments it metes out upon those who stray from the accepted norms, the blind faith that is placed in the judgement of God by the government (and to an extent, the people).
To me, however, it read like a collection of Greek myths. The people on the islands, the women swathed in burkas, the men unable to withstand the temptation of beauty, live as though in a dream. Barbaric and otherworldly, they are cast out to sea, with no chance of escape. Thus, they punish outliers, and pray for the water around them to lose it’s salinity, so that they can return to some kind of utopian existence—a heaven—that is rumored to exist, but threatens never to return if they keep on committing small evils. A Sisyphean world. Dante’s domain cast in circles of milky white glory.
In the world of Rasoulouf’s construction, humans are not creatures full of reason. They are, however, full of a deep, sacred sense of the profound, of the forces of life that cannot be explained when you are cast out on islands in a bone white sea, isolated from all other civilizations, your only connection to a greater world the man, Rahmat, who comes to collect your tears.
If a purgatory were to exist, then it must be located in the space of this movie, which was filmed on Lake Urmia in Northwest Iran. On the horizon, the pale blues meet the sea, which blends seamlessly into the white, white sands, and in turn, laps against the crystal white stalactites that make up the islands. Swoon. I could never have, in my wildest dreams, imagined a place so beautiful.
I wish I had seen the water on a larger screen, because I bet it would have really moved me. As it were on the plane, it lulled me into a stupor. Half way through, I closed my eyes to rest them for a few minutes. Then I finished the film, and promptly fell asleep trembling on Caleb’s lap, where I lay my head in supplication to my dreams, full of visions of the apocalypse. I shit you not.
