Banned in Iran, this sophisticated and poetic (if sometimes incoherent) debut by Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat has a lot going for it, especially visually and politically. Based on a 1989 novel, Neshat’s depiction of Iranian women’s lives in mid-20th-century Mossadegh-era Iran manages to slip from brutal realism to oblique magical realism with relative ease, although sometimes at the expense of cogency.
The director’s historical portrait of a 1950s Iran on the cusp of cataclysmic political change is wholly believable, as is the depressing position of the women at the center of Neshat’s film: a fairly diverse cross-section of women is represented here, all of whom, in their own ways, go against the grain to try to free themselves from the vice grip of Iran’s oppressive patriarchy. Most all of these women—each of differing class backgrounds—have closeted dreams of something more than just dutifully serving a husband. Not surprisingly, they all pay a heavy price for such dreams of independence.
There’s Munis, pushing thirty, whose intimidating brother threatens her with bodily harm if she doesn’t go out and find a husband soon—she spends her days in Tehran dreamily listening to the political news on the radio, eventually finding a new lease on life as a clandestine communist. Fakhri is a fortysomething with a suppressed artistic past who is in the process of boldly divorcing her authoritarian husband. The most disturbing portrait, however, is of Zarin, a prostitute who somnambulates through her degrading existence at the beck and call of a tyrannical local madame—she’s clearly scarred for life by her transactional sexual experiences with men and ends up in a near-catatonic stupor for much of the film.
But the film is unremittingly bleak in its new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss determinism: sure, the Americans and British are to blame for deposing the democratically elected Mossadegh and installing a military dictatorship under the hated Shah. After all, the West wasn’t going to stand back and let Iran nationalize their oil supply. And of course, as the film also demonstrates, the sad truth for Iranian women is that whatever sociopolitical changes take place in their country, their status as second-class citizens always seems to sadly stay the same. Recommended.