Rosewater

Rosewater aborde des thèmes importants qui nous interpellent directement, notamment à propos de la notion de liberté de pensée et de liberté de presse.

Malheureusement, Jon Stewart possède les défauts de ses qualités. Certes, le cynisme et l'humour noir vont avec le sujet, mais il manque à ce Rosewater, présenté plus tôt cette année au Festival international du film de Toronto (TIFF), une dimension émotionnelle qui permettrait de s'identifier à Maziar Bahari (comme dans La jeune fille et la mort pour ne citer que ce long métrage). L'effort est donc louable, surtout pour une première œuvre, mais le présentateur devra peaufiner son écriture et son style de réalisation s'il veut être remarqué plus avant.

For a first film, Rosewater is pretty accomplished, although certain choices don't entirely work, with scenes of Bahri communicating with the spirit of his dead father while imprisoned feeling a little manufactured

There is some humor to be found here, of course, and a bit of exploration of the sheer boredom of being trapped for days inside four white walls, and moments of real connection between Bahari and both his family and the political revolutionaries he gets to know on the street. But Stewart doesn't pursue any of these ideas enough to stick, resulting in a film that relates incidents without ever really telling much of a story.

My one real gripe with Stewart's script is that it doesn't make clear that Bahari (according to his own account), though admitting to ''media espionage'', did not name names, i.e. implicate reformist leaders, fellow journalists or others, as his captors wanted him to. This is a very important point in his decision to cooperate with their televised ''confession'' of fabricated malefactions.