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An absorbing illustration of how minor actions and bad decisions can amplify one another (and have ripple effects of their own), “No Date, No Signature” is a sturdy morality play from the theater-trained Iranian director Vahid Jalilvand, making his second feature.
It begins with a forensic pathologist, Dr. Nariman (Amir Agha’ee), who, when winged by an aggressive passing car, hits a motorcycle carrying an impoverished family. He checks the 8-year-old boy who was riding for a concussion, sits with him for a bit and urges the family to take him to a medical clinic. The father, Moosa (Navid Mohammadzadeh), initially refuses compensation but relents.
Then the boy turns up dead in Dr. Nariman’s hospital. Sayeh (Hediyeh Tehrani), the colleague who performs the autopsy, rules the cause of death to be botulism — something that a test confirms the boy had. What are the odds?
It soon becomes clear that the movie is a dual character study exploring the lives of Dr. Nariman and Moosa, each with a limited sense of what the other knows, and each seething with guilt. Was botulism the immediate cause of death? Would the boy have died within days anyway, even without the accident? Should the parents know what Dr. Nariman fears, particularly as it bears on their subsequent actions?
A tad overdetermined in its studied, snowballing ambiguities, “No Date, No Signature” is dramatized with an acute sense of the role of class in Iranian society, and is unfussily well directed, creating visual parallels between the two men.
No Date, No Signature
Not rated. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.
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