Under the Skin of the City

Compared to recent extraordinary Iranian films such as The Circle or The Day I Became a Woman, this effort by Rakhshan Bani Etemad--meant to portray the sad plight of women under the current Islamic regime--is a disappointment. An old-fashioned tearjerker, Under the Skin of the City centers on Tuba (Golab Adineh), the matriarch of a lower-class Teheran family, who works her fingers to the bone to care for her disabled husband and assist her children, but whose efforts prove frustratingly ineffective. All four of her sons and daughters are trapped between their dreams and the harsh realities of life, and her husband, in an act that symbolizes her ultimate failure to hold things together, plots to sell their house. The misfortunes are piled on with lachrymose overemphasis, and Tuba becomes a kind of Iranian version of The Grapes of Wrath's Ma Joad, watching sadly as one disaster after another befalls her brood. While one has to respect the film's intentions, the ad nauseam multiplication of the family's domestic difficulties ultimately dissipates the narrative power, thereby missing the raw emotional nerve similar Iranian films have struck. An optional purchase. (F. Swietek)