THE LAST SUPPER

THE LAST SUPPER is an Iranian melodrama about a 45-year-old female college professor in Iran, named Mihan, who hates her stifling marriage to a bank manager. She can’t hide her feelings about her husband to her daughter, Setareh, who convinces her mother and father to get a divorce. Although Mihan’s husband says he loves her dearly, he hates the fact that she works and feels inferior to his intelligent wife. This causes him to treat her rudely and angrily demand that she spend more time at home.

Mihan moves into her father’s old house with her daughter and her housekeeper. Her daughter, who takes her classes, becomes friends with one of her other students, a handsome young man named Mani, but Mani’s romantic interests clearly are for the mother, not the daughter, despite their significant age difference. Mihan tries halfheartedly to discourage the young man, but Mani will not be deterred. Tragedy results.

Movies made in Iran are among the cleanest movies being made today. Very few of them, if any, contain foul language, graphic violence, sex, or nudity. That does not mean, however, that the worldview, philosophy, spiritual themes, socio-political messages, and other moral elements are appropriate. THE LAST SUPPER is a case in point.

Judging from this movie, and the others which MOVIEGUIDE® has reviewed in the last few years, some filmmakers in Iran have rejected the traditional, flawed morality of the Islamic faith, but they have replaced that flawed morality with the flawed immorality of the feminist, politically correct modern world. This is definitely not a positive trend.

In THE LAST SUPPER, the married, feminist-oriented protagonist is not just chafing under the strict, unbiblical Islamic commands that seem to keep many women in the Arab world in chains, she also eventually rejects her society’s social, moral injunctions about proper mother-daughter relationships, proper student-teacher relationships and proper age differences among couples who become romantically involved. Such injunctions are not just cultural conventions, they also speak to an absolute, transcendent, eternal moral order that help all people everywhere avoid destructive mistakes. Tragedy clearly results from the protagonist’s ill-considered decision to marry her student, 21 years her junior, but the movie clearly sympathizes with the doomed couple when she makes that decision.

Thus, THE LAST SUPPER reflects a strong Romantic worldview, despite a brief nod to God in the opening credits. The movie sends the message that traditional society and moral absolutes stifle the individual. The filmmakers combine this message with strong feminist sentiments about women being allowed to make any choices they wish, including morally questionable ones. As such, THE LAST SUPPER appears to reflect a nominal, liberal type of Islam. The Christian Church should reject all such types of liberal, antinomian religious thinking, which, if carried to the extreme, ultimately end in complete lawlessness, or close to it. Such thinking represents a false theology that can harm billions of people, including our children and grandchildren.

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Iranian Film Society

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