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Jon Stewart’s ‘Rosewater’ reveals journalist’s ordeal in an Iranian prison

[additional-authors]
November 12, 2014

Iranian-born journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari’s life was compelling long before he became the plotline for the movie “Rosewater.” 

Bahari had traveled to nearly 70 countries to report on the issues of the day, some of them conflict zones, and nearly lost his life once, when child soldiers threatened to kill him. 

“Was it Burundi or Congo?” he tried to recall during an interview last week. “Actually, it was Congo.” 

Bahari’s childhood in Iran was similarly turbulent. His father, a communist activist, was imprisoned and tortured by the shah during the 1950s, and, three decades later, Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime went after his sister. Bahari left Iran at 18, in the 1980s, and moved to Canada. He now lives in London, but when he returned to Iran on a routine assignment to cover the 2009 presidential election for Newsweek, the Iranian government showed no mercy: During a violent crackdown on civilian protests, the working journalist Bahari, then 42 — with a young wife at home and a baby on the way — was roused from his sleep one morning, thrown into jail and tortured for 118 days.

He wrote about his four-month ordeal in Iran’s Evin Prison in a memoir, “Then They Came for Me.” He took the title from the well-known poem attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came,” about the cowardice of bystanders in the face of the Nazis: “Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. / Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It is that memoir that is the subject of “Rosewater,” the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, the revered host of “The Daily Show.”  

Stewart also wrote the screenplay for “Rosewater, and he cast the dashing Mexican actor Gael García Bernal to play Bahari. 

Although neither Bahari nor Stewart knew it at the time, their eventual collaboration was sealed in June 2009 when a “Daily Show” crew covering Iran’s presidential election interviewed Bahari for a sketch aptly titled “Behind the Veil — Minarets of Menace.” The satirical segment — in which the show’s comedian-reporter Jason Jones posed as a spy and asked Bahari why his country “is so terrifying” — was later used by the Iranian government to support charges of Bahari’s “espionage.” The segment was an obvious spoof. In it, Jones wore a T-shirt with an arrow pointing to his producer saying, “I’m with Jew,” and he repeatedly interviewed Iranian civilians about why they hate America (none of them said they did). 

How else could a well-intentioned Jew respond to such misapplication of his humor but with atonement?

“Listen,” Stewart told New York Magazine recently, “Jews do a lot of things out of guilt. Generally, it has to do with visiting people, not making movies.”

A month after his release from prison, Bahari went to New York and appeared on “The Daily Show” to talk about what had happened to him. The two men bonded easily over humor. “If I went on Jon’s show and was really somber and a tortured soul, and, you know, very serious, he wouldn’t be attracted to me,” Bahari said when we met in the offices of the film’s distributor, Open Road Films. “I think he saw some light at the end of the tunnel with me.” 

Bahari, a nonobservant Shia Muslim, certainly subverts stereotype. With his 1995 documentary, “The Voyage of the St. Louis,” about the 937 German-Jewish refugees turned away by the U.S. and Cuba on the eve of World War II, Bahari became the first Muslim ever to make a film about the Holocaust. 

“Being Jewish always seemed so exotic, so fascinating to me,” he said.

He counts Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Leonard Cohen among his cultural heroes, and his bond with Stewart is in some sense another expression of his appreciation for how each uses his particular talent to illuminate, lament or lampoon a tragic world. Call it art as analgesic, or a cultural coping mechanism. Because just as Stewart uses comedy to root out corruption with ridicule, Bahari relied on humor, savvy, smarts and a fecund imagination to defy his captors and write his way out of despair. 

Bahari, second from left, and Jon Stewart, second from right, with the movie’s cast members, including Haluk Bilginer, left, Shohreh Aghdashloo, third from left, Golshifteh Farahani, fourth from left, and Bernal, far right.

“When I came out of prison, I wrote about 50,000 words within 20 days or so,” Bahari said. “I just had to write in order not to forget. Even when I was in prison and my interrogator was saying idiotic things, or something interesting was happening, I would rehearse it in my head over and over again in order to write about it later.” 

Bahari “remembers” his ordeal with a great dose of wit. In the book, he writes of hearing Leonard Cohen music in his head and of having had completely imaginary conversations with his deceased relatives. This allowed Stewart ample creative license, which he used to add fantastical elements into the screenplay. There is a scene about halfway into the film, in which Bahari is suffering a bout of primal despair, when he begins to hear Cohen’s lyrics in his head. Stewart realizes this fantasy with great visual effect in a scene where Bahari dances ecstatically — almost dementedly — to the music, melting away the physical trap of his solitary confinement. Although the film’s mood is sometimes dark and somber, Stewart finds ways to inject lighthearted moments into the misery, establishing the realm of the psyche as the only relief from physical brutality. 

“The memory of Cohen’s words and music saved me in prison,” Bahari told Moment Magazine in 2011. He elaborated further in our interview, adding, “I came from a family that was interested in things, a loving family; I lived through a revolution, a war, migration, being really poor, studying, then becoming a professional, making a living from what I wanted to do, traveling to different countries, having watched so many films, having read so many books, and so I think that really sustained me.” 

Because much of the plot plays out in Bahari’s head, Stewart visually externalizes Bahari’s thoughts. He treats imagined conversations with Bahari’s father and sister as if they were real, staging those characters in the cell with him. The colorful family exchanges, Bahari said, were especially attractive to Stewart.

“Jon and I talked a lot about the generational aspect of [this story],” Bahari said. “My father and my sister were fighting for a better life for themselves and for other people, and so from the beginning of my childhood, it instilled the idea of social consciousness.” 

“The Daily Show” has also had a consciousness-raising effect for a generation of young people. Even if the show’s self-effacing host insists it is just entertainment and was never intended as a catalyst for political change, it has, in its way, exposed government hypocrisy and inefficiency, and challenged underachieving journalism. Stewart’s fearless approach in critiquing failures of people and institutions often makes his work seem like real journalism, though he is quick to distinguish between himself and Bahari as purveyors of truth; instead, he refers to the institution of “The Daily Show” as a form of “sideline activism,” which uses the tools of satire to express a point of view.

With “Rosewater,” however, the scintillating satirist had a chance to cut his teeth on something more serious. “ ‘Rosewater’ is about witnessing things,” Stewart told New York Magazine. When Stewart was later asked whether embarking upon a new medium posed a risk to his career, he offered a principled response: “The failure would have been not attempting it.”  

“I think [Jon] is at a point in his career where he wants to try something else,” Bahari said of the 16-year “Daily Show” veteran. “He wanted to do something less ephemeral. Because, to him, even though ‘The Daily Show’ is a great institution, he compares it to egg salad: It can be a great egg salad one day, but two days later, it smells like sh–.”

The obvious irony is that “The Daily Show” was serious enough to get Bahari in trouble with the Iranian government, though both Bahari and Stewart are careful to dismiss claims that the show’s segment was responsible for Bahari’s arrest. In fact, the Iranian government had been monitoring him for some time, Bahari said, and during his second appearance on “The Daily Show,” after his memoir was published, he made a point of setting the record straight: “The [Iranian regime] wanted to fabricate charges,” he told Stewart on air. “I could be on ‘Sesame Street’ and they would accuse Elmo of sedition.” Stewart later told New York Magazine, “[Y]ou can’t control what idiots will weaponize.”

The 2009 election between incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the former prime minister-turned-political reformer Mir-Hossein Mousavi was undoubtedly a tense time. Viewed by many as potentially game-changing for Iran, scores of young people who had grown disillusioned with Ahmadinejad’s repressive regime flocked to support Mousavi and his reformist Green Movement. So when Ahmadinejad shocked the nation by declaring himself the winner, rumors of a rigged election swirled throughout the country, triggering a tidal wave of civilian protests. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard quickly worked to suppress expressions of revolution, even as Bahari’s arrest drew international condemnation, including from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Bahari said he was not a threat to the regime. “I was always observing the ‘red lines’ as they call it, the thresholds of tolerance of the regime,” he said, describing his journalism as a means of monitoring the government without directly opposing it. “It wasn’t as if I was a renegade.”

The absurdity of his situation is reflected in the film, in which Bahari’s interrogator — whom he nicknamed “Rosewater” for his ample perfumed scent — even uses stories of sexual massages in New Jersey as proof of Bahari’s delinquency. In perhaps the most madcap scene, Bahari “confesses” to traveling the world because he is addicted to massages. Stewart’s home state, New Jersey, Bahari tells his obviously sexually frustrated interrogator, is particularly rife, a veritable “massage playground”: “I have heard of people dying of pleasure,” Bahari tells Rosewater. The ridiculousness of it relieves the tension in the torture chamber. 

Other days, Bahari’s interrogator would accuse him of collaborating with Jewish “elements” and Zionists (and this was before his Hollywood work with Stewart).  

“The regime has a hate and envy relationship with Israel,” Bahari said. His interrogator, in particular, talked about Israel with a kind of perverse fascination. “Whenever my interrogator was talking about Israeli intelligence and Israeli methods of interrogation and kidnapping, he said it with such envy; I remember he said, ‘You know when that Argentinian’ — he didn’t know the name Eichmann — ‘when the Israelis went to kidnap that Nazi in Argentina? Don’t you think we can do that?’ ”

Even given the abuse Bahari and his family have suffered over the years, he is nonplussed by the regime’s public threats toward Israel and Iranians’ attitude toward Jews. “Anti-Semitism is more of a Western phenomenon. In Iran, much more criticism goes toward Israel,” he said. In 2011, Bahari told Moment Magazine that he believes the Iranian regime possesses an “exaggerated and unreal idea of Israeli power and the Jewish people in general,” but he does not believe Iran would actually launch a nuclear bomb at the Jewish state. “They’re not suicidal,” he said of his country’s leaders. 

After suffering so much ugliness at their hands, Bahari nevertheless is surprisingly generous in his assessment of the regime’s contempt — or, at least, its efficacy in acting upon its contempt — for Israel. To him, the friction between the two countries amounts to fodder for a Freudian analysis, a subject he studied at Concordia University in Montreal. “Israelis need an enemy, and Iran provides the best opportunity and rhetoric for an enemy,” he said, adding, “I think this is just a fabricated war.” 

He has made work about that which he speaks: In March 2012, the BBC aired Bahari’s documentary “From Cyrus to Ahmadinejad: The Not So Secret Iran-Israel War,” in which he traveled to Israel and interviewed Iranian Israelis — including pop star Rita — about the checkered history between the two countries. “Iran and Israel had peace for ages,” Bahari said. “They were the two natural allies in the region.” As such, the documentary portrays the relationship as a story of “secret alliances and public hostilities” reflecting each country’s “struggle for legitimacy.” 

It is the kind of documentary not likely to be made in the United States — imagine if a major American news network treated a story about Israel, ally, and Iran, enemy, with total parity — though Bahari declares up front that Iran forbids the BBC from reporting there, so all interviews for the documentary had to be conducted off the record. Still, it is a reminder of the countries’ historic cultural and political ties — how, in 1947, Iran voted against the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine but later opened an unofficial embassy in Israel under a code name, and how Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, made a point of cultivating Iran as ally.

In 1958, a group of Iranian delegates traveled unofficially to Israel to study the country’s economic growth. In the documentary, an Iranian economic adviser comments on how impressed they all were that Israel was able to turn a “poor country into a European country in such a short time.”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Bahari said he believes Iran will one day experience a similar transformation. The incipient political movement that was so brutally suppressed in 2009 planted a strong-willed seed of reformation. “I think what Iran is going through right now is like a fever that is going to heal the country,” he said. 

His own experience left him scarred but not broken. “Being Iranian means that you’re a survivor,” he said. “The other day, someone asked me whether talking about this and making the film opens old wounds. And I said, ‘No; it’s just healing. It’s just the healing process.’ ”

“Rosewater” opens in Los Angeles on Nov. 14.

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