A Persian life, through the prism of Jerry Lewis

Jerry & Me is an autobiographical short documentary film narrated by the filmmmaker, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, an Iranian-born teacher of film at Columbia College, Chicago, where she has been since 1989. She tells her own story via a method another writer about her film, Adrian Martin, who describes it in great detail, calls "fan psychoanalysis."* She describes her life while referring to one of her fascinations growing up as a movie addict in Iran in the Fifties and Sixties, the films of Jerry Lewis, starring himself, hugely popular in Tehran, so they could be readily seen. She uses clips of Jerry Lewis films, many (incongruously, we would think) dubbed into Farsi, to illustrate moments in her own life -- her desire to become another person, her exposure to the violence of war, and so on. Kubrick's Lolita, also seen by the filmmaker in Iran, makes her compare James Mason as Humbert Humbert to her father, who divorced her mother while she was out of the country and married a woman forty years younger, close to her own age.

As a child in Tehran at the time of Mohammad Mosadegh, then the halcyon days for the bourgeoisie under the Shah, when there were many big cinemas with western names like Rivoli or National, Saeed-Vafa's philandering father took her to the movies every week. There she got to know Jerry Lewis, John Wayne, and other American movie stars. She treats us to a breakneck tour of Jerry Lewis films; they speed by so fast it's hard to take in either them or her narration about her family discontents, her parents' non-communication, self-consciousness about being dark-skinned, and other details -- her father's philandering, her mother's work as a midwife. She also sketches in a quick political and cultural history of modern Iran. That's a lot to saddle Jerry Lewis with, even with clips of John Wayne (saying "There is no God but Allah" as he goes out the door past a sexy Angie Dickenson). She didn't know Jerry Lewis was a Jew, but "that would have been alright because I had many Jewish friends."

Saeed-Vafa studies film in London and there discovers Bresson. She returns and teaches film in Iran. (One of her students is Jaafar Panahi, the banned, imprisoned, and internationally celebrated contemporary Iranian master director.) She is in Iran for all the big changes, including the arrival of the Islamic revolution in 1979. That leads her like many others to try to live with tight new restrictions by making a film about a child, but the project can't be completed.

Still later she comes to the US and gets an American MFA in Illinois, begins teaching film, and makes some short films (she gives the titles; as Martin mentions, only a couple are listed on IMDb). She shows a clip of a film she made in Chicago of her little boy -- does she try to pass on to him her discomfort about being dark-skinned, which he does not feel? She mentions having husband problems. In 1996 Jerry Lewis himself comes to speak at Columbia College, and she shows several clips of that appearance including an anecdote where he describes feeling like an Arab among a group of Hollywood screenwriters who no longer welcome him after the big success of The Bellboy in 1960. (Lewis himself has been a considerable teaching of filmmmaking, but Saeed-Vafa doesn't mention this.) In the Q&A after Lewis's Chicago talk an Arab called Hakim speaks up to say the casual racism of his joke about feeling like an Arab made him uncomfortable. Apparently it made Saeed-Vafa uncomfortable too -- she has described being alienated after 9/11 -- or she is just too intimidated by encountering the mythical figure of her cinephile youth in person, because she does not talk to Jerry Lewis in 1996, or at any other time.

Though the clips and "fan psychoanalysis" are interesting enough, Saeed-Vafa's timidity is a hint that there are missed opportunities here. It's a fabulous idea. And the filmmaker brings her whole sensibility to bear. But one wonders if a narrative as earnest as this really fits with Jerry Lewis' films, no matter how passionate the self-revelation and ingenious the use of film references and film clips. For all the salient points about cross-cultural experience deduced by Martin, this short film doesn't provide as illuminating a perspective on either Jerry Lewis or the filmmaker as it might have done. As so often with autobiographical documentary films, it provides above all therapy for its maker, which serves a similar purpose for those who have had similar experiences.

Jerry & Me, 38 mins., was shown at the Glasgw Short Film Festival and was screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 25-Aug. 12, 2013. Jonathan Rosenbaum is listed as the project adviser; he and Saeed-Vafa are coauthors of a book on Abbas Kiarostami (Contemporary Film Directors Series - University of Illinois Press). Saeed-Vafa has also been consultant for the Gene Siskel Center for festivals of Iranian films for many years.

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*There's another detailed discussion of this film by Ehsan Khoshbakht on MUBI.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.