‘A Bit of Light’ Review: A Mournful, Quietly Comic Drama From Iran

As its modest title suggests, A Bit of Light (Kami nour) is a quiet film. Like its middle-aged protagonist, the movie is straightforward and unaffected, and compellingly so. He’s a Tehran physician, out on bail after being arrested for tending to wounded protesters. His medical license revoked by government authorities, his office ransacked and placed under official seal, he insists that he’s “no longer a doctor” and has concluded that there’s nothing left to live for. But as he moves through the day that he intends to be one of his last on earth, a sense of purpose persists and, crucially, something beyond it is reawakened.

In its understated celebration of the ties that bind us, Ali Asgari’s absorbing drama, which he wrote with Shadmehr Rastin (whose credits include Jafar Panahi’s Oscar-nominated feature It Was Just an Accident), hardly says anything new. And yet it packs an undeniable wallop with its twinges of grief and flutters of absurdity. A Bit of Light would be potent under any circumstances, but within the context of this perilous moment in world history — the movie’s events unfold as Tehranis are bracing for threatened American attacks — the soul-deep weariness and struggle for hope that it evokes will resonate with many audiences.

The doctor at the story’s center is played to muted perfection by Misagh Zareh. Arash, who’s being hounded by intelligence service agents and has no interest in playing along, is at the opposite side of the authoritarian divide from the bureaucrat Zareh played in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (another Academy Award contender). As he embarks on a day of tying up loose ends and relaying his drastic plan to his three siblings and mother, he has a stoic resolve, but every sigh and glance and infinitesimal shift in his demeanor suggests boundless depths of dammed-up emotion.

But he would deny this. Arash is certain he’s being nothing but reasonable. Deed transfers and other necessary paperwork are already taken care of when he confronts his younger brother, Maziar (Ramtin Daghigh), in the movie’s opening scene, handing the tearful man his spare car key and his cat. Arash’s sisters will get his voluminous well-tended plants, setting off one of the movie’s running visual jokes as the potted greenery turns into a portable jungle, first in the elevator of his apartment building and then in his car.

Akbar (Mohammad Askari), the talkative janitor who tries Arash’s patience as he helps him close up the apartment, is something of a clown, foolish and naïve and provoking a touch of deadpan sarcasm in response. But he’s certainly no villain like the doctor who will show up later to scold Arash, defrocked and traumatized though he is, for having dared to treat “rioters.”

Given that “this Trump guy is threatening to bomb here every day,” Akbar offers to tape up Arash’s windows, assuring him in the next breath that the “precision strikes” won’t harm civilians because “Trump wouldn’t lie.” Taped-up windows become another funny/sad motif, an emblem of the limits of self-protection in a world gone mad. In an intriguing footnote, Akbar also mentions the pending arrival of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that recently became an alarming headline story. (The war had already begun when Asgari was filming in Tehran, and the production moved to Turkey to complete its interior scenes.)

A highlight of the film is Arash’s conversation with younger sister Mahsa (Sadaf Asgari). Plant in hand, he arrives at the yoga studio where she teaches in time to see a class full of women in corpse pose — a moment that plays out with far more subtlety and impact than a written description might indicate. Having taken in her brother’s shocking news, Mahsa shifts from stunned sarcasm to profound sympathy and probing philosophical dialogue. She understands that he’s more sensitive and intuitive than the average bear: “Your soul is exhausted, my dear,” she tells him. In a line that goes to the heart of the movie, she suggests he consider the possibility that “suffering and joy are not enemies.”

There are references to recent tensions between Arash and his other sister, Masi (Forouzan Jamshidnejad), and after hearing his plan, she interrogates him with less compassion than her sister offered. But she’s similarly interested in disproving the conclusion Arash has drawn from his recent ordeal: Why is self-destruction his only option? The siblings find distraction, of a sort, at an underground theater performance of a play that Masi’s son, Siavash (Alireza Barabarian), is involved in. The scenario of the two-hander echoes the young actor’s offstage plans to leave the country, and it also stirs up the looming question of how Arash will tell his mother that he’s leaving her for good. Once the four siblings, along with Arash’s understandably dismayed cat, show up at the home of Mom (Mina Rahimzadeh) — or, as Maziar calls her, “the final boss” — the burning existential etiquette question is “Do we tell her before or after dinner?”

Asgari, whose 2023 feature, Terrestrial Verses, written and directed with Alireza Khatami, was fueled by a spirited poetic sensibility, here finds poetry in the prosaic. With the often fixed camera of Iman Tahsin, also the film’s editor, A Bit of Light taps into a core aesthetic of modern Iranian cinema, holding its characters in a stillness that is charged with feeling. Abbas Kiarostami’s suicide-themed (and open-ended) Taste of Cherry is another touchpoint. But in comparison with that movie’s central character, Arash grows less single-minded as his daylong journey progresses.

His intended farewell tour is punctuated by continuing medical responsibilities. He pays a house call to one of the anti-government protesters he’s been treating, a young man who’s in dire shape from a bullet wound. “Don’t leave us alone, Doctor,” the man’s mother pleads. She’s afraid that even worse would befall her boy if they went to a hospital, and Arash struggles to find a colleague to pick up where he’ll leave off. Sometimes the work is the result of an unexpected intrusion, as when the daughter of one of his patients shows up, in desperate need of a prescription renewal for her father. To get her the proper paperwork will require a detour from his schedule for the day, and there’s more than a little comedy, however subtly played by Zareh, in his exasperated response to this change of plans.

Interconnectedness, the movie acknowledges, can be annoying as well as nourishing. But each deviation from Arash’s carefully composed end-of-story script, whether in the form of an old woman asking him to carry her groceries or a sobbing Maziar urging him to snap out of it with sex and inebriants, can be a burst, a bit, a hint of light. That interruptions and diversions shape our lives no less than purposeful strides is not a novel idea, but it plays out here with particular elegance and zing as this fluently crafted story draws to its simple pow of a final moment, when a small living room is transformed by an irresistible tune.