Tatami 

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Hello Charlie and hello reader ! 

Let me ask you a question: would you bend over your government’s order or would you refuse and put in danger everything and everyone you love  ?

This is the big dilemma of the movie, of Leila, an Iranian judoka and her coach, Maryam . She is competing for the judo world championship. She is doing very well, even too good, and she may competes at the final against an Israeli judoka : the Iranian government  orders her to withdraw from the competition because of that .

(By the way it is inspired by a real story, which kinda change the vision you have on the movie when you watch it.) 

Let’s do a little analyze of everything I found interesting in this film . 

First of all the choice of the color, and well quite literally the first thing that you see : the directors chose to cancel the color and tell the story in a black and white tint . We could see many reasons that explain this choice, but I think the most relevant is simply that when you take out color of life, you take out his joy: it reflects perfectly the story, joyless and dark . 

There is not a lot of music in this movie, which is not appreciated by everyone . But more importantly, the only music that we hear, is the music that she listens . So first of all nothing is distracting us from the story. We are focus on the voices, the sounds and the (very important ) silence . But we also feel connected to her, we have the weird feeling of being is her brain :it is almost not a film anymore , we don’t have the artifices of a movie, and it gives us the impression that we are on the tatami with her, her music in our ears . 

The way this movie is filmed is also a definite choice : we only have very close up plans and sometimes very large ones . No in between. The large plan let you breath a few seconds from the anxiety that we share with Leila .

The close up plans are giving more intensity to the movie, and highlight the brilliant actresses,  seeing every precise detail of the their faces, every eyebrow move and eye squint . 

I would overall really recommend this movie, because it is powerful, in it’s fight and in it’s rare simplicity. Also because you could watch this movie 10 times and still see another little detail. 

If you have a I-love-seeing-impressive-woman-movie list, this one definitely belongs in it .