Movie Reviews: Body of War, Four Minutes, Shotgun

 SILENCE OF THE SEA Two common themes in contemporary Iranian cinema — the pain of exile and the peculiarities of home­coming — give shape to writer-director Vahid Mousaian’s 2003 drama Silence of the Sea, in which an Iranian actor and playwright (well played by Masoud Rayegany) now living in Sweden returns home following the death of his parents. Landing in the island port city of Qheshm, the man, called Siavash, experiences the de rigueur culture shock and phones ahead to alert old friends on the mainland of his imminent arrival. But then a Buñuelian predicament arises — Siavash finds himself unable to leave this aquatic way station, and the more he tries, the more firmly he stays put. Mousaian has a sensitive approach, but he does dialogue (“I don’t want to remember the past, man!”) nearly as leadenly as he does metaphor: All roads (and waterways) from Qheshm are inevitably clogged with literal ghosts of the past (including Siavash’s parents) and fellow travelers seeking passage out of — rather than back into — the country. Elsewhere, the movie dutifully ticks off its European modernist influences: a troubled Scandinavian marriage straight out of Bergman; an existential beach borrowed from Antonioni. Presented on a double bill with director Bahman Ghobadi’s 1999 short film, Life in Fog, which served as the inspiration for Ghobadi’s 2000 feature A Time for Drunken Horses. (Vine Theater) (Scott Foundas)

 THEN SHE FOUND ME First-time writer-director Helen Hunt stars as April Epner, a schoolteacher desperate to have a child before she turns 40 (Hunt herself turns 45 this year, but never mind that). Adapted by Hunt and two other writers from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name, Then She Found Me is a not-surprisingly confident debut; Hunt directs like she acts — straightforward and without humor, even when she’s meant to be funny. Which is probably why this plays like such an odd hybrid: a sitcom pilot rendered as Lifetime melodrama and starring the likes of Matthew Broderick (as her husband and, no kidding, an irresistible man-child), Colin Firth (as the single-dad love interest) and Bette Midler (as the famous mother who gave Hunt up for adoption when she was a year old). Broderick is broad, doughy and dopey — not at all believable as The Guy Everyone Wants to Fuck. But Firth’s terrific, and Midler’s, well, Midler — you keep expecting her to break into song. Even if you didn’t know who directed going in, you’d know coming out; Hunt gives herself more close-ups than Norma Desmond (and Barbra Streisand — no small feat). In short, it’s the kind of film that only a mother, which is to say my mother, would love. (ArcLight Hollywood; The Landmark; Monica 4-Plex; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Robert Wilonsky)