The Last Step | AFI Fest 2012 Review

Stepping It Up: Mossafa Returns With a Murky Puzzle

Director Ali Mosaffa returns with his sophomore feature, The Last Step (his last directorial effort was 2005’s Portrait of a Lady Far Away), a labyrinthine puzzler that continually and perpetually tricks us, mostly to great effect. Some may feel disappointed by its rather oblique finale, but one can’t help but appreciate the astoundingly intriguing way he’s constructed his tale. Known primarily as an actor, Mosaffa is also married to the leading lady of his film, Leila Hatami, who Western audiences should instantly recognize from her starring turn in last year’s A Separation.

The film opens with an actress, Leili (Leila Hatami), in the middle of filming a scene for her latest film. We quickly learn she has only recently lost her husband, Koshrow (Ali Mosaffa) under strange circumstances, and the film she’s making is eerily about a woman mourning the loss of her recently deceased husband. However, Leili cannot get around saying a certain line about forgetting the face of her husband. She keeps laughing when she should be crying. Chalking it up to the fact that she’s returned to work too soon, the film set grumbles as Koshrow’s omniscient narration informs us that he’s recently died and there’s a strange turn of events that have led us here. But, “Let’s forget about the order of events,” he tells us. And so we’re ushered into a serpentine tale about a woman, Leili, married to an architect, Koshrow, who rightly suspects that his wife has grown tired of him and perhaps, never considered him her true love in the first place.

At a dinner party, an aging singer sings a song that moves Leili to tears, and come to find, it was a song sung to her by a young man that courted her in her youth in Tafresh. Her callous rejection of the man appears to have caused his demise, something Leili has never forgiven herself for. Meanwhile, Koshrow keeps having recurring pains, and visits a mysterious doctor that seems to think Koshrow has cancer. Feeling a new zest for life, now knowing that time is limited, Koshrow ponders the relationship with Leili, but, in one verbally tense moment, an accident precipitates an event that may or may not have something to do with his body being found at the top of the stairs, the only architectural mistake of the immaculate home he designed. It turns out, the last step is noticeably taller than the rest, a flaw that not only disrupts the rhythm of those going up the stairs (not to mention the narrative), but also a fatal flaw that trips and maims.

Mosaffa, the director, star, and screenwriter of The Last Step is much like the architect he embodies onscreen, the film he directs displaying the same fatal flaw as the house Koshrow builds for himself—the last step is too high and a bit overreaching. But that’s not to say the workout getting there isn’t without some enjoyment. Koshrow describes his work as making “buildings as awkward as their owner’s tastes,” and the same observation can be made of film, as Mosaffa’s custom built artifice may certainly not be to everyone’s tastes. The first half, in particular, is quite good, as it quickly unveils its sly traps and dead ends, the narrator’s warning at the outset daring us to put the puzzle together as he leads us through. Was his death not accidental? What’s up with that guy Leila may or may not have loved? And what the hell is that strange doctor doing in the mix, excited to audition for the part of Leila’s ghostly husband in her latest film, which happens to be casting sometime before Koshrow’s unprecedented demise? Some of these questions are answered, some less satisfactorily than others.

This nicely acted endeavor, its beautiful montages captured on 35mm, happens to be a hybrid of classic literature, borrowing both from James Joyce’s The Dead and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Mosaffa has lofty aspirations indeed, and The Last Step plays like an intellectual mind game, determined to confound as easily as it aims to please. The film won the FIPRESCI prize at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and Leila Hatami took home the Best Actress prize. And you can certainly add Mosaffa’s name to a growing list of notable Iranian directors.

Reviewed on November 3rd at the 2012 AFI Film Festival – BREAKTHROUGH Programme.
88 Min