The Failsons of Saeed Roustaee

"Leila's Brothers" director Saeed Roustaee's films are enamored with the male in arrested development, his parasitism, and his futile dreams.

The four brothers of Leila’s Brothers (2022), with the titular Leila in the center.

Attempting to pinpoint the terms that define a certain insular, vague feeling of an age, is oftentimes an exercise in futility. By the time one comes up with a phrase that evokes a picture-perfect image of a place in time, that time has passed, only given a definition now through the gift of hindsight and context. Still, there is one term that has survived years of thick and thin and has retained its potency as the years have rolled on: the concept of the “failson”.

What is the “failson”?

He is a man who continues to falter and whither when faced with challenges and obstacles. However, unlike others who have failed and must get back up again or die, he can and will fail again because of the generosity of others and the resources he can draw from at the drop of a hat. He is far disconnected from any reasonable age to be in education, benign quarter-life crisis, or anything that could be considered an understandably fraught turning point in early life. He may be in his 30s, he may have a wife, he may even have children. Every year that he continues on this path is a reminder of just how stuck in his ways he is, and how he may never be set on a different one.

These are the kinds of people who Iranian director Saeed Roustaee has set his sights on for almost his entire career. From his first moments as a filmmaker, Roustaee has been indebted to the third wave of Iranian New Wave cinema. The third wave was dominated by the work of Asghar Farhadi, whose films like the Academy Award-winning A Separation brought renewed worldwide recognition to Iranian cinema. Roustaee considers Farhadi as much of an influence on him as Sidney Lumet, and the influence of the former on Roustaee’s early shorts is obvious. What differentiates Farhadi’s films from Roustaee’s however is the scale of the self-destruction and the weights of society.