His Father’s Son is the first feature film from writer-director Meelad Moaphi.Mongrel/Supplied
His Father’s Son
Written and directed by Meelad Moaphi
Starring Alireza Shojaei, Gus Tayari and Mitra Lohrasb
Classification N/A; 80 minutes
Opens in select theatres June 20
No matter how close they may be with their children, parents retain an air of mystery. Their youth is only accessible secondhand; through stories, photographs, and overheard recollections. On the other end of the spectrum, children can become enigmatic to their parents during adulthood. Although this mutual unknowability is part of a natural – if slightly wistful – order of time, its pains can be intensified by things parents and children hide from each other.
This dynamic is the subject of Canadian writer-director Meelad Moaphi’s first feature His Father’s Son. Amir (Alireza Shojaei) is a cook at a fine-dining restaurant in Toronto, hustling on the side to build a culinary platform on social media. He is disaffected and slightly brooding: his restaurant job has become rote, but he also appears to be an unconfident influencer, stumbling to nail recordings of his cooking videos.
There’s tension between Amir and his father Farhad (Gus Tayari), who once regularly visited his son’s restaurant but now implores him to cook more Persian food, while making anxious digs about his social media aspirations. “The older you get, the more difficult it becomes to fix your life,” Farhad muses. Ouch – though it seems he’s speaking from experience.
Amir’s family is tight-knit insofar as they spend a lot of time together, but mother Arezou (Mitra Lohrasb) and charming younger brother Mahyar (Parham Rownaghi) overcompensate for the chilled dynamic between Farhad and his first-born.
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From King Lear to Succession, a confusing or complex inheritance instigates the plot of countless family dramas. Here, Moaphi uses it as a device to explore how families cope with intergenerational tensions when the past announces itself in the present. Early in the film, a sunny park picnic is interrupted by news that Farhad and Arezou’s old friend Parviz has died. They haven’t spoken since leaving Iran many years ago.
More surprising still is the fact that Parviz left all his money to a baffled Mahyar who has no memories of meeting him. Why not Amir? While Farhad throws together an apologia about Persian symbolism — honouring the family by leaving a fortune to their youngest who will continue the line — there’s a sense that this is only a half-truth. The full picture gets pieced together through the questions they avoid answering or engaging with.
His Father’s Son is focused on issues of Iranian-Canadian identity, exploring how immigrant experiences can refract down the family line to create a complex sense of cultural belonging. Amir’s girlfriend Dina (Romina D’Ugo) encourages him to fuse Iranian culinary influences with his videos of Italian pastas, thus embracing a supposedly repressed part of himself. There’s some truth to this repression, seen when Amir’s father drops off a Tupperware of home cooking that gets swiftly thrown away, but Dina’s comments also reflect the pressure on Amir to perform a kind of “authenticity” that isn’t his vision.
His Father’s Son avoids the overstated writing and performances often endemic to first features. It isn’t overly ambitious for its small Telefilm-funded budget either. By focusing on a smaller cast in largely intimate conversational settings, Moaphi crafts an appropriately taut container for bottled-up emotions. At the same time, some of this restraint works against the film. Events have the quality of belonging to a play, not because the acting is stagey, but rather because the talk-heavy film makes little creative use of its audiovisual medium.
Most spaces are visually uninteresting or cast in cool, neutral tones drained of aliveness. Soundtrack and score are scarcely used. While restaurant scenes were shot at La Banane on Toronto’s Ossington strip, both this setting and the city more broadly appear generic. Even as this aesthetic treatment syncs up with the film’s themes of liminality and alienation, it amounts to a lack of sensuality – particularly striking when food figures largely – that doesn’t seem wholly intentional.
To capture the complexity of his characters’ experiences, Moaphi favours muddled ambiguities over neat narrative arcs that resolve conflict in cliche or predictable ways. A more sentimental yet unrealistic narrative might end with images of Amir finally cooking Iranian dishes for his family who have emerged transformed by confronting long-held secrets brought into the open. Instead, Moaphi opts for a fragmentary approach more in tune with the uncertainties of real life.
One of the film’s most commanding moments is incredibly short: a nearly still image of Amir sitting across the table from a family friend in silence. The beginning or ending of a revelatory conversation that isn’t shown to the audience. Similarly, the final scene gestures toward an incomplete but tentatively hopeful reunion between father and son. In this film, the breath taken before speaking is more powerful than the thing said.
