AllMovie

Perhaps it would be easy to dismiss Mohammad Shirvani's Navel as so much navel-gazing if its loose-limbed narrative and digressive discourse didn't expose us to an element of Iranian culture that has not yet been explored in cinema. While it's fascinating in its cultural specificity, Shirvani's bare-bones video production also exposes middle-class Iranian adults who sit around talking and smoking (and talking about smoking), and competing for the attention of the pretty woman in the room, just like a similar group in any other country in the world might. The lack of narrative focus, the seemingly pointless driving, the use of night vision, the "birth" sequences that begin and end the movie, and the self-recording (as characters record each other and, occasionally, themselves) give the film an almost dreamlike, after-hours feeling. But sharp details stand out -- a cigarette lit with the lens of one character's glasses; Reza (Reza Hassanzadeh), the former cleric's brief, touching encounter with an unidentified woman; Chista (Mana Rabiee), dressed in white, floating through a crowd of women in black chadors; and later, her private videotaped confession to an unappreciative ex-boyfriend. Chista, being a Westernized Iranian woman, offers the viewer a strong point of identification. The meandering talk, the jokes, and the digressions add up to more than the sum of their parts, producing a surprisingly powerful sense of melancholy. There's a pervasive feeling that the characters stand outside their own culture, and that the connections between them -- whatever fleeting joy they might produce -- are ephemeral.