A great deal of Rafi Pitts's ferocious and nimble fourth feature, The Hunter, focuses on a near-meditative treatment of the act of driving, not unlike fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. The gentle hum of sedans, trucks, jeeps and cars running over asphalt and through tunnels dominates Pitts's sonic landscape, punctuated only by a radio-broadcasted speech by Ali Khamenei, in his now infamous response to President Obama's 2009 address to Iran on the eve of the country's presidential election. The solemn protagonist of The Hunter, Ali (Pitts), is similarly played as an ominous agent of dread, punctuated by spikes of desperation, frustration, anger and, towards the beginning, genuine happiness.
The rage felt by the insurgents during and in the wake of that election can be felt palpably throughout The Hunter, which Pitts also wrote, but what is remorsefully absent is the radical, violent emotions that are spurred and left unchecked by these events. Pitts constructs a thin metaphor through the tragic murder of Ali's wife, caught in a cross-fire between police and insurgents; his daughter goes missing at the same time and is, later, assumedly dead. The cops are either unwilling or unable to give Ali an answer to why this has happened, establishing another tier on Pitts's bleak, hugely cynical view of his country. Ali's act of rebellion is the assassination of two police officers from a distance, a crime for which he is apprehended not all that long after.
A botched punchline to a mean-looking procedural, the film takes an odd turn as the two officers who arrest Ali get both literally and metaphorically lost in the woods with their prisoner, prompting a weighty moral quandary and terminally despondent existentialism. Pitts's Iran is not all that different from Balabanov's Russia or Haneke's Austria (or France) and the coiled intensity of the film's swift, hard-boiled narrative makes for some extraordinary passages, not the least of which being the shooting itself, which occurs as if pre-destined but remains hard to shake. DP Mohammad Davudi, who worked on Pitts's superior It's Winter, attains a near-perfect pitch of isolationism not only in Ali but in the daily life of Iran, especially following the wife's death.
Pitts's tone here is that of a godless culture, even as the supreme leader's words float out on the airwaves. The result is a movie that seems overwhelmed, maybe even snuffed out, by its own anger; we keep waiting for the outrage to erupt but even as the confused cops consider shooting him in the woods, Pitts remains distanced, if not completely detached. His tone here ultimately suggests pitch-black humor that ignores the obvious hope that can be seen in the eyes of the Iranian protestors marching over an upside-down American flag in the still that is shown throughout the film's opening credits. This confusion belies the film's aesthetic cool but coming out of a country all too happy to imprison its artists and dissidents, The Hunter certainly doesn't allow you to mistake the seriousness of the emotions at play.
