Trust cinema Mohammad Reza Delir wrote in Etemad newspaper: “Meeting the Witch” is a film produced in 2018 directed by Hamid Bahramian, who has a history of serialization and programming in his career. “Meeting with the Magician” cannot necessarily be considered a comedy film in its special cinematic sense, but this film is only aimed at making the audience laugh at any cost! Unfortunately, in recent years, Iranian comedy cinema is moving towards a kind of vulgarity, which has lowered the audience’s taste to such an extent that they laugh at every cheap joke and leave the cinema satisfied! Jokes that are mostly sexual and repetitive. This type of comedies make indirect references to old and threadbare audits, such as joking with Taghut era singers and sixties songs, or joking with officials, which is ironically absurd and repetitive. This type of Iranian comedy cinema, ironically, its actors are also repetitive! A series of actors that we see everywhere and in all movies!
“Meeting with the Magician” was written by Amir Mehdi Johle and he played the lead role in it. However, in the end credits of the film, Mani Haghighi’s name comes first in the list of actors! Amir Mehdi Jholeh, who started writing with Chelcharagh magazine, in the following years joined the writing team of Peyman Ghasemkhani and the works of Mehran Moderi, and then turned to acting. Today, he has reached the point where he can play the lead role in a movie! Juleh is basically a concerned person and has social, cultural and political concerns and works hard for them; In (Meeting the Magician), he touched on a subject that has been one of the most important and biggest criticisms of some government officials in recent years, the issue of noblemen and economic corruption, which is mixed with a little sexual joke in this film! Of course, this is not the first time that a writer or director approaches these subjects in the comedy genre. Jules is reminiscent of Woody Allen in many ways.
The character he plays in this movie is a clumsy, unattractive guy who gets into trouble for his stupidity. According to the performance of Aghazadeh and the reaction of users in the virtual space, the subject of the film could have been far better and more mature, but it must be said that Meeting with the Witch has a problem with narration and storytelling and has actually become an amalgam of repetitive and boring sexual and non-sexual jokes. Several parts are included in one story line. What we see in meeting the witch is the ineffectiveness of the genre and the director’s lack of appropriate and calculated attitude towards cinema! Because all the components of the film are incomplete in the text and performance.
For example, Sara comes to Iran to find Ata. He, who has been living in America for several years, speaks Farsi without the slightest stutter, and Atta, who ate his money, does not have any stress or anxiety on his face! Besides, we don’t know if Arash loves her or not. In meeting with the magician, we see a contradiction in everything; This importance is clearly seen in the reactions and behavior of the characters. We are facing a piece of work that has completely forgotten its direction. The script of Meet the Witch has minimal coherence and fails to introduce the characters to the audience. In the film, we see countercultural sequences and erotic mise-en-scenes. It seems that instead of dealing with the subject of the film, which is social and political phenomena such as nobles, embezzlement, rent, and financial corruption, the director is involved in occasional satires.
Meeting with the witch may be considered the strangest and lowest comedy works of recent years, because the film seems to consist of a number of unrelated sequences that are supposed to make up a movie! The narrative logic of the film is one of the challenging points of the film because it does not have the ability to convince the audience! For example, the sequence of the meeting with the Chinese has lowered the level of the film and its sense of humor to the level of television nozzles. From a social point of view, meeting with a witch is an absolute disgrace. From the first sequence to the final sequence of the film, this is visible. The scene at the airport and the fear of the passenger who has just returned from the United States of being arrested seems outrageous and insulting. All the men and women in the film are abusive, vulgar and antipathetic. This movie, which is supposed to make us think with the ugly phenomenon of rent-seeking and embezzlement, prevents the formation of an acceptable process in the audience’s mind with a lot of satire and an unprincipled, superficial and general look.
The interesting thing is that in the meeting with the witch, we see the relative dominance of Juleh as the script writer over the film director, which is similar to that in most social films and famous writers of social and comedic films in Iran. Johle explains his thoughts with exaggerating and not deep teasing about Iran-China contracts, and we see that in less than an hour in the film, Azadi Stadium, which is the symbol of the identity of the capital and even the country of Iran, is handed over to China! This amount of exaggeration, slander and sarcasm seems very superficial and childish!
The cinematography (meeting the witch) is acceptable, although there is an overuse of close-ups. The coloring is modern. The contrast is done low, which has a fantasy state and does not match with the subject of the film, which is the phenomenon of Aghazadeh, which is a serious political and social phenomenon!
In the end, it must be said that “Meeting with the Witch” is a superficial and mundane film and does not fit any of the criteria of an artistic comedy and reminds of the lampoonism that has fallen to the life of Iranian cinema in recent years!