Shakib is a middle-aged wreck of a man, who found comfort in the arms of Ladan, a deaf sex-worker, after his wife and child were killed in the earthquake. He wants to start a new life with her, but the brothel owner considers Ladan his property and Shakib lacks even two-thousand tomans to rub together. As a day-laborer, he helps construct the concentration camp set to be used for an independent Holocaust film, directed by Rastegar, a pretentious director obviously inspired by several Iranian auteurs (including Kiarostami, but he completely lacks Panahi’s down-to-earth humility).
By saving the producer from a bonk on the head, Shakib gets to stay on, first as the nightwatchman and then as one of the extras. Much to his confusion, Shakib gets a further promotion when the thesp playing Hitler has a heartache. Initially, Shakib hardly looks like a dead-ringer, but the makeup brings out something Chaplinesque, circa The Great Dictator, in him. However, he requires a lot of direction, because Shakib has never heard of Hitler (in his defense, in Iran, how would he have?).
From there, the drama gets wildly crazy and brutally intense. By Western standards, Seyedi’s use of Holocaust themes are daring, pushing the boundaries of good taste, but it is clear he understands their significance better than his country’s leaders. It is definitely edgy, but it also highlights the fictional film crew’s total lack of awareness or empathy. It is hard to watch and even harder to miss the point when they force an intimidated group of extras to strip down in the gas chamber set. Of course, none of this would make any sense to anyone who denies the events the film-within-the-film recreates.
The emotional violence in WWIII steadily escalates, in a manner very similar to the films of Farhadi. However, Seyedi (and co-screenwriters Arian Vazirdaftari and Azad Jafarian) have created an extreme set of circumstances, well outside the course of ordinary life, in marked contrast to Farhadi’s realistic domestic dramas that spin out of control.
