| Description |
A disturbed young man decides to move from his family home in Isfahan to Tehran in the hope of finding peace. Haunted by his deceased father and their relationship to the river Zayandehrood, which flows through Isfahan, he also attempts to exorcise the past by writing about it. As past and present merge in the mind of the young man, both in his nightmares and his waking life, he returns to Isfahan to marry his cousin, whom he has long dreamed of ‘possessing’. However, in his broodings over the past and his inner life, he fails to consummate the marriage and deserts her, leaving her his family business.
The river, a recurrent image as frightening as any recurrent nightmare, is a metaphor for the narrator's life journey and its end in a bizarre, swampy marshland, a symbol of death.
The film, from veteran Behrooz Afkhami, is based on a novel by Jafar Modaress Sadeghi. It is reminiscent of Sadeq Hedayat’s surreal The Blind Owl, also rooted in madness, and one of Iran's most famous contemporary literary works. The River's End, an intensely artistic art film, in a very literary adaptation, uses Sadeghi's novel for a first-person voiceover. Gorgeously filmed in cinemascope, it makes impressive use of ancient Isfahan, with its mysterious archways and towers.
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