The May Lady (1999)

The May Lady is about the tribulations of a 42-year­old divorcee caught between motherhood and womanhood in a society where values are constantly changing. The protago­nist, Forough Kia, is a filmmaker assigned to make a TV documentary on the subject of the perfect Iranian mother. Her name sets the tone of the story: it brings to mind Forough Farrokzhad, a pioneer filmmaker and a talented poet, some thing of an Iranian Sylvia Plath and a voice for intellectual Iranian women. The family name Kia evokes homage to Abbas Kiarostami whose films carry a documentary quality.

Forough is a well-educated urban middle-class woman who tries to find her own space between the demands of her lover and the possessive tendencies of her young son. The woman in her yearns for an adult relationship, but such feelings are not well received by her seemingly modern son, who assumes the tradi­tional role of the male head of the family, responsible for protect­ing the female regardless of her age or status.

We watch Forough and her son Mani go through their daily routines. She is cooking or cleaning nonchalantly while arranging business affairs on the cordless telephone. He is being a typical adolescent, but perhaps not so typical for Iran as we imagine it in the West. This modern boy in blue jeans hangs out with peers and listens to loud rock music in his room, which is decorated not very differently from the room of any middle-class adolescent in the West. He even attends a Western-style party. However, he is arrested for his transgres­sion and a patronizing magistrate blames the mother and her divorced status for lack of parental discipline.

The May Lady portrays the life of an intelligent modern woman, a theme which had not been examined so realistically in Iranian cinema before. Forough’s interstitial state does not allow her to have a balanced relationship with her son or with her lover. She confides to a friend that a middle-aged woman and a mother cannot speak of love so easily. To declare that she wants to live with the man she loves would entail forgoing the honor of motherhood. In a period of transition from tradition to modernity, the burden is more deeply felt by the women of her social background and status.

In this film, Bani-Etemad (director) effectively solves the prob­lem of the ambivalence created by restrictions imposed on sexual situations in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema by eliminating the male lover totally from the screen space. To display a more natural relationship, she presents him as a voice on the answering machine or a presence in poetic letters. The most commendable aspects of the film are the poetic undertones and the intimate quality of the protagonist’s inner monologues.

The opening sequences of the film are significant when we see only half of the face of a woman; the other half is cut by the frame. Later in Forough’s bedroom, audience attention is drawn to her photo hanging over the bed; there is a shadow on one side of the face. Is the visible half, the half she shows to the outside world and society, a perfect career woman and a perfect mother, repressing her feelings as a woman? Or is this the half that her son and hence the society are ready to see and accept? Bani Etemad told me during our discussion that the other half, which is not seen, is not limited to personal love. Rather, it is about things she cannot talk about.

The image of a woman with half her face in the dark may also represent the image of women in Iranian cinema, the image that the Islamic Republic has decided to put inside the frame, an image that negates feelings and sexuality and forces women to have a dual character, public and private.

If the film has a weakness, it is in its overall message, which again could be attributed to certain restrictions imposed on filmmakers or to self-censorship. First, there is a tendency to suggest that the tribulations women face are the same no matter where. This is questionable considering the repressive regime of Islamic Iran. Second, the film shows that all evils that fall on the heads of women come from men. Men beat their wives and throw them out, men run away and leave mothers to shoulder the responsibility of bringing up children on their own, men blame women for not being perfect mothers. In one of the clips from the documentaries of the protagonist, the daughter of the former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani retorts, ‘In our country, the problem is the law . . . All judges are men, who don’t understand the problems of women.’ It is rather simplistic to blame men rather than looking for the roots of evil in the patriarchal system itself. Third, the woman/artist is depicted as a mediator of discordant elements, the balancing force between adverse forces of society. When the son has a row with the militants of the Ansar E-Hizbollah (the followers of the Party of God), his mother, the woman/artist, reconciles the two opposing forces — modernism and fundamentalism — by preaching tolerance and compromise. It is fine to offer flowers instead of guns as in A Moment of Innocence, a film by another distinguished Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, but the concept is rather romantic for Iran’s present reality – Gönül Dönmez-Colin

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1999, Genre – Drama, Country -Iran, Language – Persian, Director – Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Cast – Golah Adineh, Minoo Farshchi, Mani Kasraian, Baran Kosari, Atefeh Razavi

Children of Heaven (1997)

One of the most successful Ira­nian films in the West, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven received an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film. It opens with eight-year-old Ali losing his younger sister Zahra’s newly repaired shoes. To avoid admitting this loss to his father, Ali and Zahra share a pair of sneakers, and much of the film revolves around their at­tempts to manage their exchange without being late for school.

The importance of shoes is emphasized when hundreds are depicted lined up outside a mosque, where the children’s father works serving tea, while their owners pray inside. Scenes in which the camera often focuses on the feet of the children running through the often cramped streets of poor, southern Tehran strikingly contrast a sequence set in the upscale, northern part of the city, where Ali proves much more capable than his father of communicating with the wealthy, coming to entertain a privileged boy while his father sprays trees in a spa­cious garden.

Finally, Ali enters a race in which third prize is a pair of shoes, but ends up disappointed when he comes in first. Children of Heaven is a melodrama, and Majidi uses slow-motion and emotive music, among other devices, to ensure audience empathy with his young characters. The film’s English title substitutes “Heaven” for “Sky,” a more literal translation from the Persian.

Cast and Production Credits

Year – 1997, Genre – Drama, Country – Iran, Language – Persian, Producer – Amir Esfandiari, Director – Majid Majidi, Music Director – Keivan Jahanshahi, Cast - Mohammad Amir Naji ,Mir Farrokh Hashemian, Bahareh Sedighi, Nafiseh Jafar Mohammadi ,Fereshteh Sarabandi ,Kamal Mirkarimi, Behzad Rafi ,Dariush Mokhtari ,Mohammad Hassan Hosseinian ,Masumeh Dalir, Zahra Mezani ,Kazem Asgharpour ,Mohammad Hossein Shahedi, Seyyed Ali Hosseini

Sara (1993)

Inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and adapted to Iranian realities, Sara presents a positive protagonist, who is effectively involved in the welfare of her family. She saves her husband’s life by borrowing the money for his operation with­out his knowledge and embroiders wedding gowns secretly in the house for four years to pay back the loan. When the husband, who is shown as a self-centered character with tunnel vision, finally finds out, instead of thanking her, he gets upset because now they are indebted to his corrupt clerk. He calls her ‘a brainless woman’. In an emotionally charged scene, he stands on top of the stairs and yells at Sara’s tiny figure down below that he will not let her bring up his child. By the time conflict reaches a resolution, Sara has gained a new outlook on life, which makes it impossible for things to remain the same. Her final look from the rear window of the taxi as she leaves her husband is full of fear and apprehension. The film is open-ended, but there is every indication that her revolt is far from over. Now that she has gained self-respect and confidence, she can have a new start, with or without her husband.

The last duologue between the couple is significant. Unlike the routine conversations about mundane daily matters that we had heard before as the couple sat to eat while watching television, this is the first time they really talk to each other:

Sara: I have been victimized, first by my father, then by you. Neither of you treated me like a human being. When I was at my father’s home, I had to think like him. If I had an idea of my own, I had to shut up because he did not like being contradicted. When I began to see things, I fell into your house. Here I was the mute little darling who had to do what she was told to do and keep quiet.

Husband: No man would sacrifice his honor for the sake of love.

Sara: And yet women do it all the time.

Apart from Sara, there are two other women in the film: the old aunt, who is the epitome of a woman seen and not heard, and Sara’s friend and confidante, Sima, an independ­ent, self-supporting widow. Unlike Sara, Sima is not afraid of men. She knows their weak points and she knows how to deal with them, which is unusual for women who are brought up in traditional Muslim households, where mothers install the fear of masculine superiority in their daughters at an earlier age.

Sara’s revolt brings about a revelation; faced with a determined woman, men are as helpless as a child. The roles can easily be reversed. The circular camera shots of the last sequences show the confused state of the husband running around his wife, who is calm and composed as she prepares her luggage. As the taxi pulls away, he stands at the door helpless like a child who has lost his toy. With only a bedsheet covering his lower parts, he also looks rather ridiculous.

Among the ‘women’ cycle of Mehrjui’s work, Sara is perhaps the most outstanding. The film enjoyed wide popularity in Iran, especially among women who found the story of a woman’s sacrifices for her husband and the selfishness of Muslim men who put disgrace to their honor before everything else very familiar – Gönül Dönmez-Colin

Cast and Production Credits

Year - 1993, Genre – Drama, Country -Iran, Language – Persian, Director – Dariush Mehrjui, Cast – Niki Karimi, Amin Tarokh, Khosro Shakibai, Yasman Malek-Nasr