Also this issue:

Punch Drunk
Undisputed gets giddy on the sweet science, and forgets the good stuff.
-Cindy Fuchs

repertory film

The Langue Goodbye
Paul Rudd mercilessly mangles the language of love in The Château.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

new

August 22-28, 2002

movies

De-mock-cracy

Getting the vote out: Nassim Abdi takes the ballot box to the people.

Secret Ballot pokes fun at the voting process without diminishing it.

SECRET BALLOT

by Sam Adams

SECRET BALLOTWritten and directed by Babak Payami A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse

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The box falls from the sky like a gift from God, but instead of inspiring awe, it provokes confusion, fear, even anger, which is all the more surprising considering that all the box contains is another, smaller box and a stack of blank pieces of paper. But voting hasn’t come to this small, unnamed Iranian island easily.

The box is followed, in short order, by the government agent (Nassim Abdi) charged with carting it around to remote areas in order to obtain as many completed ballots as possible. The soldier (Cyrus Abidi) who's duty-bound to drive her around balks at the task: "They said they were sending an agent," he says with annoyance. "They didn't say a woman." The two make an uncomfortable pair, she young and idealistic, he skeptical and pragmatic, and though Babak Payami's allegorical yarn isn't quite a comedy, their odd-sock pairing is purely intentional. As we've come to expect from his countrymen, Payami shoots in lengthy, unmoving long shots, often from a considerable distance, letting every detail of the landscape sink in. When the two clamber aboard a boat to secure votes from its crew, the camera stays so far back their wobbly dinghy is barely a blip on the screen, underscoring the enormity of their task, and injecting a note of absurdity as well.

A quick surf through earlier reviews of Secret Ballot reveals a high degree of confusion about the movie's political stance: Is Payami endorsing democracy or mocking it? The answer, it seems obvious, is both. As the day progresses and the government agent encounters more and more obstacles to her task -- one man brings a truckload of female voters and then tries to fill out all their ballots himself; another forces her to buy his wares before showing her his ID, which reveals he's not a citizen -- her resolve begins to wane. At first, she brushes off objections with blithe certainty; when one person comments that elections will do no good, she responds, "You'll never know unless you vote." But after trying, unsuccessfully, to interest the workers on a farm run by one Nanny Baghoo, the agent decides, "Nanny Baghoo doesn't need to vote. She has her own government here."

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The soldier, on the other hand, becomes more and more engaged as the day progresses. Though he never has a grand moment of awakening, he starts to engage the agent in real debate about the nature of democracy. Why, he wants to know, is there only one election every four years? "Why not three or four elections a year?" Bound as she is by her position, the agent has no answer, but we later see the soldier sitting, staring at the sea, perhaps contemplating the world beyond the island for the first time, and certainly in a new light. Though Iran has been a nominal democracy for more than 20 years, the power of the vote has only recently begun to be felt. Secret Ballot has the feel of a country testing the waters, wondering what democracy really means, rather than simply accepting it as a bumper-sticker cure-all. Considering our own (justified) cynicism on the subject, it's good to be transported to a place where such questions are more worth debating than shrugging off.