Review: 118 days

a harrowing tale

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Movies based on real events, especially when they report a great difficulty experienced by a person, are always shocking and make you reflect on the subject at hand. 118 days it achieved the purpose of reflection, but it was not a very shocking representation of the facts.

Directed and adapted by Jon Stewart (in 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' ), in 118 days (rosewater) we see a very current problem passed by the Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal), who was confined for 118 days. Bahari resided in London in the late 2000s and was expecting her first child. To help with the family budget, he accepts an extra job to cover the 2009 elections in Iran for the American magazine “Newsweek”. He arrives in his country in June, a few days before the elections, disputed by the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and by the opposition candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

On election day, supporters of candidate Mousavi took to the streets to protest against Ahmadinejad's declaration of victory even before the polls closed, the demonstrations end up being treated with a lot of violence and death so Bahari decides to take a big risk and send footage to the BBC publish.

It doesn't take long for the police to invade his mother's house (Shohreh Aghdashloo), where he was staying and take him into detention, where he is imprisoned for 118 days on a charge of Treason until he confesses that he is a spy. During this time, Bahrari is beaten, tortured and isolated by a man known by the alias rosewater (Kim Bodnia).

118 dias
118 Days | Image: Diamond Films

It is to be expected that it will be a suffocating production, but in reality everything is represented in a very light way. Don't expect to see those strong torture scenes, with a lot of blood and limbs being ripped off, in reality the great torture here was psychological, with isolation and threats. In fact, the fact that they do not resort to flashy violence is a great differential in the construction of this work, it ended up making it more profound than those that use this method. The only problem was the excessive use of what we can characterize as humor. Whether it was intentional or not, in some parts we felt a comical tone, which ended up mitigating the serious situation that the journalist went through.

Regardless of the tone of the work, it fulfills its role of presenting a real problem, which deserves attention, and presenting the memories of those who went through it, with the help of Bernal's great performance.

The account of Bahari's memoirs is in the book written by him, Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival (So They Came For Me: A Family Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival), which served as the basis for the film.

See the technical sheet and full cast of 118 Days

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