Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui offers a heart-rending account of addiction.

By Kevin Thomas
Special to The Times

Jan 25 2008

"Santouri the Music Man," a harrowing account of a greatly gifted
artist's slide into heroin addiction, is another sweeping yet incisive
film from Dariush Mehrjui, one of Iran's most accomplished and
courageous filmmakers for four decades.

The complete article can be viewed at:

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-santouri25jan25,0,6146788.story

SANTOURI (THE MUSIC MAN) On his way to becoming the Grand Old Man of Iranian cinema, something interesting has happened to Dariush Mehrjui.
From his stunning 1969 sophomore feature, The Cow (the first modern Iranian film to reach Western audiences), to The Postman (1972) and The Cycle (1974), Mehrjui was filmmaker enemy No. 1 of the shah's censors, and deeply influential on the generation of filmmakers that came of age after the Islamist revolution. How times — and Mehrjui — have changed:
Following a fine series of mostly conventionally made films about women, Mehrjui's latest, Santouri (The Music Man), shows that he's absorbed the influences of the youngsters in its story about Ali (Bahram Radan), a popular singer-songwriter and player of the santoor (an ancient stringed instrument played with two small mallets) and the emotional and physical price he pays for his heroin addiction. There's a loose, fluid rhythm that courses through the film like an elixir, especially in the freeform way Mehrjui shifts between Ali's devastating downward course — set off when he is banned by authorities from playing in public — and his happier past and marriage to fellow musician Hanieh (the incandescent Golshifteh Farahani). Far from serving as some sort of screed against the excesses of a younger generation of artists, Santouri suggests that
Iran's current cultural repression and rampant drug addiction are no
mere coincidence.