The Scorpion's Song: Golshifteh Farahani in an Indian Film

Golshifteh Farahani's experimentalism is her most important feature in acting; she usually appears in different roles, avoiding typecasting and repetition in her performances. Naturally, she is not always successful in her various roles (including, I believe, in Jim Jarmusch's film), but her efforts for new experiences are commendable. While it seems she is now established enough to regularly act in Hollywood films (likely with much higher salaries than, for example, European films), she has appeared in an Indian film. "The Scorpion's Song" directed by Anup Singh premiered a few nights ago at the Piazza Grande during the 70th Locarno Film Festival, with Golshifteh performing in front of about seven thousand spectators. The film showcases Golshifteh in a role that is different from her previous ones. In a small village in Rajasthan, Nouran (played by Golshifteh) is a young girl living with her grandmother. When there is a need for medical attention (including victims of scorpion stings), she tends to the sick and tries to heal them with herbal remedies and singing, earning the villagers' trust more than that of doctors. However, a man played by the well-known Indian actor Irrfan Khan is madly in love with her, and when he hears "no," he executes a sinister plan. Nouran's character initially seems appealing; a lonely girl who, while contemplating materialism, also seeks to achieve a degree of spirituality in her work. The film clearly expresses the conflict between these two worlds, placing Nouran's efforts to earn a living in contradiction with the essence of her work, and symbolically and mythologically considers the calamity she endures as a form of retribution for her materialistic thoughts. The film pursues this perspective in the aspect of revenge/forgiveness or love/hate, attempting to juxtapose them from various angles. The best scene related to the theme of love/hate occurs when Nouran kisses the man for the first time. Golshifteh's gaze is a strange blend of love and hate with many question marks about what is going on in her mind, along with continuous cuts and very close shots of the lips and faces of Golshifteh and Irrfan Khan, creating a strange mysterious atmosphere. Once Nouran discovers the man's secret, the film becomes vague and ambiguous, and all the efforts made for Nouran's characterization go to waste. We no longer understand why Nouran continues this kind of life, making it difficult to follow the film. The final scene, which is supposed to reveal the secret of this decision, is shallowly executed, and the dialogues and reactions of the characters in such circumstances are not believable, while the relatively vague ending of the film—somewhat about liberation from material life—does not answer the audience's questions. The film is fundamentally about duality and the opposing sides of life, but it itself suffers from a kind of duality that fundamentally harms it. On one hand, the film follows a realistic story in a realistic setting, while on the other hand, it seeks to have a mystical and surreal atmosphere, attempting to connect fairy tale/mythical stories to a simple local narrative. The result of combining all of these keeps the film in limbo: in some scenes, the filmmaker is captivated by the simple setting of the shoot, while in others, he is enthralled by the mysterious mystical atmosphere where characters deviate from the usual storytelling process, leading to events that the filmmaker sees no need to explain. As a result, "The Scorpion's Song," despite a few beautiful scenes—including the mentioned kissing scene—fails to create an intellectual film with multiple layers and also fails to create a commercial film with the presence of a star of Indian cinema that could attract a large audience.