A confession: It wasn't until this film was half over that I realized Bahman Farmanara's sweetly sanguine death rattle of a film was a comedy. That isn't to say the film is humorless, but a review of the finer points of Farmanara's first film since the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 (after which he was censored by the regime) certainly doesn't sound funny: A once-celebrated, long-censored filmmaker gets hired to make a documentary about Iranian burial rites. In the process, he decides to film his own funeral. (Get it?)

Death is a subject the embittered director, named Bahman Farjami, knows all too well. He still mourns his beloved wife, his father, and several close friends, and Farjami himself, after two heart attacks, is morbidly preoccupied. Moving depressively through his funereal research (grave sites, memorial signs, corpse-washing, etc.), smoking suicidal cigarettes and clutching his arm in pain, he looks as though he could drop at any moment--almost like he wants to. "I don't fear death," he narrates. "I fear a futile life."

Through the film's three acts, Farmanara capitalizes on the uniquely Iranian cinematic art of filming the other senses. The smells that lie at the center (and in the title) of the film--camphor, the balm of the dead; and jasmine, the sweet flower of life--are the warring stimuli that Farjami (and Farmanara) must reconcile before he can resolve to live and work again. In the final act--which spills over with color as Farjami looks quite literally at his own death and finds it entirely insufficient--he finds his resolve in the birth of a grandson, and in the simple splash of a pebble in a murky pond. It's not the joyous celebration that ends Fellini's 8 1/2 (Farmanara's obvious inspiration); it's a small smile. But in a world where religious extremists can forbid you to do what you do for almost half your life, a small smile may be the best you can hope for.