A Hero                  4 stars

For my first new release of 2022 I had the chance to see A Hero, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, the acclaimed filmmaker from Iran who previously won Oscars for his films, A Separation and A Salesman. This time he brings us a morality play called A Hero, about a man, Rahim, who has been imprisoned for failing to pay a debt, but is allowed a two day leave to visit family. Rahim has a family who stand by him through the ordeal and a girlfriend who has found a lost purse containing several gold coins, so after some consideration, Rahim decides to try to find the owner and return the purse. With the eventual success of reuniting the owner with the lost coins with the help of his girlfriend and some prison officials comes newfound fame as his story is picked up on social media and he is proclaimed to be a hero by the community. With his fame, Rahim hopes he can find a job that will persuade his accuser to allow his release from prison, as Rahim promises to repay the debt. The story then becomes an example of no good deed will go unpunished, when certain details of the story of the returned coins don’t match up and Rahim is not able to prove what really happened. The movie has similar elements to Farhadi’s earlier works, where the characters are neither good nor bad. Their actions fall in a grey area as they find themselves trying to do the right thing in a difficult set of circumstances. I liked the story and the fact that we get to see what life is like in a foreign culture that we are normally not exposed to. The movie is a bit long at just over two hours and it sometimes gets a little tedious as parts of the story seem to get retold a few too many times. Since it is all done with subtitles, one does have to pay close attention to what is said. I expect that Asghar Farhadi will receive one more deserved Foreign Film Academy Award nomination for A Hero.