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Written by Sheila Seacroft
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14 07 2010 |
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 Directed by Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari
Like Sam Taylor Wood with Nowhere Boy and Steve McQueen with Hunger, Shirin Neshat is an artist who has turned to feature film. In this case her film has been developed from a series of video installations in collaboration with fellow artist Shoja Azari, on stories of four Iranian women, adapted from a novel by another Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur. All three are émigrés, now long term residents in the west, as are most
of the actors involved, and the film is a melancholy view from afar of
the frustrations of women in Iran along with a keen nostalgia for the
often harsh beauty of the place. Set in 1953, when a CIA and MI6 -led
attempt to reinstate the Shah and prevent the nationalisation of Iran's
oil overthrew the democratically elected, tentatively reforming
government of Mohammad Mossadeq, there are achingly familiar scenes of political protest in the streets of Tehran. Change the slogans, and it's today.
Four different women illustrate the diverse pressures on women's freedom then and now. The film opens with a long held and a staggering beautiful shot of grey stone walls, blue sky and a woman in a fluttering black burqa which makes her seem already the insubstantial wraith that she is soon to become. What follows is a fascinating mix of almost documentary realism, as in the street demonstrations, and magical realism, where the dead can come back to life, and a countryside haven is a magical place almost out of fairytales. Politically aware Munis (Shabnam Toloui) is prevented from taking part in any kind of civil life by her brother who is only interested in seeing her married. Her friend Faeza (Pegah Ferydoni) is all tradition, until she is raped.
Zarin (Orsi Tóth) is a gaunt, self-harming prostitute, and the westernised Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad), a mature wife of an army officer dissatisfied with her authoritarian and loveless marriage. All four escape their lives, to a house and orchard away from the city, where for a while a gentle but doomed bliss reigns. Not only is this an outstandingly beautiful, sorrowful fable of women's and democracy's oppression, but it's also a salutary lesson for western audiences in the sordid and damaging part played by Britain and America in Iran's recent history. Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 25 June 2010 
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