The Brooklyn Rail

True to its name, Ali Asgari’s Divine Comedy is not only a direct reference to Dante but also mirrors his narrative structure: two companions journeying from hell to paradise. Bahram, a forty-year-old acclaimed filmmaker, takes on the role of Dante the questioner, accompanied by Sadaf—his producer and partner—on a daylong odyssey from morning to night. The first stage is hell: the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Bahram seeks permission to publicly screen his latest film in Iranian cinemas but faces closed doors and prohibition. The ministry’s “hell” resembles an interrogation chamber, and Bahram, without even drinking the proffered tea, prepares to leave this ominous place. From there, the narrative takes on a purgatorial quality. In the guise of a “Virgil,” Sadaf leads Bahram to her acquaintances in the hope of finding a way to screen the film. Yet everyone they meet is caught in their own purgatorial limbo, forced to comply with censorship, repression, and unjust bureaucracy simply to survive. Thus the entire narrative is woven from absurd situations, and even without being a comedy, the divine law governing the text renders the characters’ conduct comically grotesque.

The film’s title carries a dual function: for the viewer familiar with Dante, Divine Comedy becomes an allegory of a journey from darkness toward hope; for the Iranian audience, it reads as an ironic nod to the daily geography of life—passing through the labyrinth of bureaucracy and the farce of power—until suddenly, in a historical moment (the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime), it takes on the guise of hope. In Iran, Divine Comedy is not a comedy; it is a representation of the grotesque.

The absurdity in Divine Comedy is not the product of imagination or artistic exaggeration but rather the raw exposure of reality in Iranian society. The interrogation room of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance is merely a pretext to reveal the contradictions of everyday life: an official interrogates Bahram not for complex themes or political critique, but simply because a dog appears in his film. Bahram sardonically remarks, “In a world where people speak of artificial intelligence, we are still stuck with the problem of a dog.” It is a bizarre yet—to Iranians—utterly familiar situation, where the most basic trivialities are turned into matters of national security, laying bare the gap between our society and the world in a single line.

This same logic of absurdity recurs in other scenes: an actor who snorts cocaine in private, posturing as “modern” and seemingly freed from constraints, ends up performing in state propaganda productions. Here, absurdity springs from the lifeworld itself; a society where even the most modern gestures are ultimately recycled in service of the same reactionary machinery.

The film’s static frames intensify this absurdity—not as a purely aesthetic choice, but as the very fabric of the situation. Here the influence of Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson is unmistakable. Andersson possesses a poetics: his fixed, motionless frames are not merely a “style” but a formal system, one that transforms the situation into a grotesque tableau, a comedy of terror. In Divine Comedy, too, the static frame is no longer just a visual choice; it becomes an absurd condition in itself. The immobility of the frame, paired with the contradictions of behavior and dialogue, reveals that this world is in fact this contradictory, this grotesque. Ali Asgari and cinematographer Amin Jafari, through their static compositions, depict the everyday, but this refusal to fragment a scene into multiple shots enforces a kind of distancing effect through which absurdity is laid bare.

At the same time, one of the most absurd texts in the history of classical literature is Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Though its structure rests on divine hierarchies and cosmic order, what propels its narrative is a succession of strange, often ludicrous episodes, from infernal torments to Dante’s seemingly childlike questions posed to Virgil. Dante brings comedy and tragedy side by side, and Asgari, by drawing on this duality, translates the ordinary, lived situations of contemporary Iran into the grotesque—where every gesture and every word is both laughable and terrifying. The intelligence officer who shadows Bahram like a specter, for instance, spends his private hours watching The Matrix and Malèna.

Ali Asgari’s Divine Comedy carries the same simple, heartfelt resonance as a moment in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso: the instant when the theater cannot screen a classic film, yet the projectionist casts it onto the wall behind the cinema so that the film can be shown at any cost. Divine Comedy is likewise Bahram’s personal quest to screen his work; in this sense, the film can be considered deeply personal. Yet its personal dimension does not arise from romanticism but from a form of cultural resistance. If the projectionist in Paradiso sought to give people their share of dreams, Bahram (or Ali Asgari), seeks to awaken them through his realist cinema: an awareness of the “comedy” of a lifeworld whose so-called “divine” order has been emptied of meaning.