His Father’s Son: An Iranian Canadian Clan Awkwardly Deals with Fine Dining and Troubled Masculinity

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Canada’s Oscar submission last year, Matthew Rankin’s playful Universal Language - created in collaboration with Iranian-Canadians Ila Firouzabadi and writer-actor Pirouz Nemati - imagined an alternate-reality half-Farsi, half-French Canada.

The conceit pays homage to the global influence of humanist, poetic post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. Indirectly, it also reminds us of the considerable presence of diasporic Iranians on contemporary Canadian independent filmmaking.

A short list includes writer-director Jasmin Mozaffari (Firecrackers), Faran Moradi (Tehranto), Sadaf Foroughi (Ava, Summer with Hope), Babak Payami (752 Is Not A Number) and Maziar Bahari (The Voyage of the Saint Louis) whose memoir of imprisonment was adapted into Jon Stewart’s 2015 film Rosewater.

The latest example is His Father’s Son, a Toronto-set drama written and directed by Meelad Moaphi, a filmmaker who has made several shorts and teaches film production at Wilfrid Laurier University. The film, which won an audience award and a Director’s Guild of Canada prize at last November’s Reel Asian Film Festival, is a polished work, attentively crafted and acted by a solid Iranian Canadian cast, drawn from across the country. The film’s themes are male sexual possessiveness and the way fathers can project their own inadequacy onto their sons - not necessarily just in immigrant families, but perhaps more emphatically. Refreshingly, it’s an Iranian story that doesn’t involve a backstory about prison, torture, or threats from Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. Apparently, some Iranians had other reasons for emigrating.

The family patriarch is Farhad (Gus Tayari), a men’s clothing salesman, who once had his own business in Iran. He’s a bit of an esthete and a compulsive fault finder. 

Meanwhile, the mother, Arezou (Mitra Lohrasb) cajoles, pacifies and gently mocks her grumpy husband and dotes on her two twenty-something sons, the protagonist, Amir (Alireza Shojaei), and especially his glib, laidback younger brother, the Canadian-born Mahyar (Parham Rownaghi), who still lives at home.

Amir is a chef, a career choice that is depicted as an artistic profession (there are lots of foodie close-ups of prep and plate presentation), which, perhaps like filmmaking, is not the sort of reliable profession typically approved of by immigrant parents. Meelad Moaphi underscores the parallels between making films and making meals in a series of scenes where Amir shoots videos to post on social media to promote his brand of Persian-fusion cooking.

Within the film, food is also treated a kind of emotional currency within the family— either accepted or rejected— with the plot punctuated by dinners on special occasions.

There’s a bit of a fable element to the premise of the story.  In an early scene, the father, Farhad, receives a call from a lawyer that a family friend has left his inheritance to Mahyar. The father insists that the choice of the youngest son is merely symbolic, and the windfall, just over a million dollars, will be split between the sons. But Amir is skeptical of the explanation, as is his girlfriend, Dina (Romina D'Ugo), a woman who has never met Amir’s parents because, we gradually learn, she’s married to another man.

One day, Amir and Dina take a trip to the Niagara region, a chance to canoodle midst the vineyards and, for Amir, to find out more information about the mysterious inheritance  He drops in on an old family friend (Mary Vafi), a snowy haired chain-smoker, who serves tea and offers some background about the family’s benefactor, a doctor, who treated Amir when he was a child.

His Father’s Son, which runs a tight 79 minutes, is polished and well-paced, but the resolution involves some some awkward narrative gaps, especially around the family’s favoured son Mahyar, including what exactly Mahyar does for a living that his parents view so approvingly. 

The film’s climax turns on the revelations that Mahyar has started dating one of Amir’s pretty kitchen co-workers, Joyce (Conni Miu), How Mahyar met Joyce, why Amir didn’t know, and why that should be a secret is unclear.

Amir’s subsequent behaviour toward his married lover, Dina, causes a loss of sympathy for him, reducing this to a conflict over men’s status in the competition to possess women.

Of course, the depiction of sexism isn’t an endorsement of it. And though that’s a large part of the conflict in play in His Father’s Son, potentially, the film could be about much more.

His Father’s Son. Written and directed by Meelad Moaphi. Starring: Alireza Shojaei, Gus Tayari, Mitra Lohrasb, Parham Rownaghi, Romina D’Ugo, Conni Miu and Mary Vafi. Opens in Toronto and Vancouver on June 20 and other Canadian cities through the summer.