BREAKFAST FOR TWO

Iran, 2004, 107 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Mahdi Sabbaghzadeh.

Breakfast for Two is a rather novelettish title for a film about creative writing. The film focuses on a middle-aged author with writer's block, showing in detail his life at home. When doing tai chi exercises in a park, a young girl with a suitcase bumps into him. His curiosity is roused and he follows her. The journey leads him into his own reality as a writer as well as a fantasy of writing her story. The plot is convoluted, sometimes difficult to assess what is reality and what is creative fantasy - and the same happens for the author himself.

It emerges that the young woman has written her story, is pursued by a man who loves her, is possibly murdered or kills herself (or neither) and is often seen leading the writer on so that he will tell her story. The writer also visits his mother, the young man who loves her, goes to his publisher who, it seems, might have set the whole thing up. He is also involved in the police as he acts like a detective to try to find out what has happened to the young woman.

He becomes infatuated with the woman, she leading him on, disappearing from him. Eventually, they talk - although this may be the novel itself. Back in his home, writing creatively, she appears at the breakfast table, also disappearing. A film about writer's block, imagination, creativity.

1. The appeal of the film? The story of the writer? The mystery of the young woman, her disappearance, her story?

2. The writer's home, the open road and the desert, villages, hotels, his mother's house? The reality of the story? The reality in the fantasy world?

3. The title, the culmination in happiness of the writer's quest?

4. The portrait of the writer, his block, the exercise in the park, the young woman, her pursuer? His curiosity? His phone calls to the publisher? Driving out of the city, visiting his mother? The memories of his childhood, where he played? His father? The visual style of the flashbacks? His glimpsing the young woman at the hotel, at the café? Asking people about her, pursuing her, the hotel, the outline of where the dead body was? Finding the young man, his playing his instrument, the discussion? The young man pursuing her? The various pieces of the puzzle, coming together in the story of the young woman and why she wrote her life, her relationships? Her world-weariness?

5. The writer, his involvement in her life? The manuscript? His wanting to write? His visit to his mother, the return home? His writing, the young woman's appearing at the prepared breakfast table?

6. An imaginative look at the torments of writer's block, of the flights of fantasy for creative writing?