But the work in question, according to the author of the present lines, suffers from obvious problems of form and content:
Javad Ezzati's makeup, which does not sit on the viewer's face, facial mimicry and especially the constant raising of the eyebrows, which is a failed attempt to instill a sense of helplessness and defeat in the lead role, and above all, Javad Ezzati's voice acting, which was felt more at the beginning of the film, makes the viewer familiar with cinema feel a kind of disappointment in believing in this role. With these few components, the more the actor tries to sit in the viewer's eyes, the more failure is achieved and the role becomes more distant from the actor, his body and throat than ever. Perhaps the initial mistake was in choosing Javad Ezzati, who, in contrast to the comic roles he has played in TV series and so on, has established himself as a capable and serious person in his serious works. Now, as a detective, it is difficult for him to play a failure and for the audience to believe in this failure: Mahdaviyan, who had taken the most believable role from Javad Ezzati, especially in the story of Nimrooz and the Trace of Blood, and in a dominant and successful role, and Ezzati himself in The Loser, are trying unsuccessfully to test himself in making a different role believable, as if his robes never fit the actor. Because when this same Loser gets angry and arbitrarily arrests and imprisons a suspect, he manages to return to the traditionally successful format of his serious films, especially something like what we saw from him in Butterfly Swimming, and thus bring the audience back to the film to some extent.
At the same time, repetitive elements in the scene, such as the torrential and continuous rain that almost never stops for several days, the sleeping on the couch on one side and lighting a cigarette, and the heavy makeup of a woman named Bahareh, have trapped the film in a cliché. The audience watching this film in Tehran knows that their city does not have enough rain to rain continuously and heavily day and night, and therefore most of the effort and struggle of the director and set designer to easily dramatize the scene is shown to him. In addition, the set design is so colorless and typical in some cases that the viewer can hardly distinguish the son's new house from the father's house: scenes are mostly decorated in gray and have little visual appeal, and many parts of the film take place at night, which both reduces the need for the filmmaker and set designer to pay attention to details and makes it difficult for the viewer to see more of each scene.
The idea is simple: an early and single-layered response to the needs of a viewer who has found the Aghazadehs to be sometimes corrupt and possessing rentier power and financial and business opportunities. A response without being developed in a layered story by creating a completely black character - Hossam - and his murdered friend who, in addition to sharing in the rentier wealth, is also a womanizer, indifferent to his family and a bother to his old love, who was married at one point and has a child. These are the anti-moral antiheroes in the film who, alongside the victim girl - now the murderer - show the black and white rendering of a thin idea that came from the simple mind of the writer.
The script details were also highly imitative: like Navarro, The Final Shot and many other detective works, the detective's family life progresses in parallel with the subject of the case. Again, like Navarro and In the Name of the Father and many other films, a father who has focused on his work for years and who now uses his personal and family interests - his own car and his daughter symbolically - to finance and pay for his work has a child of the opposite sex who is not compatible with him and suffers from a rebellious and traumatic anger. A father who constantly faces the anger of his child and is constantly humiliated for various reasons - lack of support, the death of the mother for which he is blamed, etc.: he has an accident while driving, he does not have an umbrella in the rain and wears a folder, he falls asleep and is late to reconcile, and the son is gone. All these elements and the type of texture and structure of the script are repetitive and directly imitative.
The story is so short and thin that the filmmaker has taken the trouble to expand it to the size of a feature film, and the viewer also becomes restless in enduring the cinema seat. The film does not trick the viewer's mind or eyes and does not drag him along, and ultimately, due to the unfairness of the structure, justice is personally carried out by the detective, at his expense and by the hands of the same rebellious boy, and the superior is also satisfied.
In any case, expectations were higher from both Mahdaviyan and Ezzati: It was as if The Walnut Tree had shown a significant decline in the course of Mahdaviyan's work, but it was hoped that it would be compensated for in The Loser: For this purpose, a return to fat ideas, rich and detailed stories, and mature and unhurried performances committed to the real style are necessary as the strengths of the filmmaker and actor.
