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Iran, She Ran
THE DAY
I BECAME A WOMAN
An extraordinary Iranian drama tells three women's tales
Written By Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Directed By Marzieh Meshkini
THE HUSBAND-AND-WIFE writer/director team who made The Day I Became a Woman must surely have risked a lot to create their provocative little triptych of tales about the lives of women in their native Iran.
Their stories are neither flattering nor happy, and they follow a most fascinating progression: The first vignette is spare and primal, the second at once both realistic and symbolic, and the third coolly surreal, like something you'd expect from Fellini or Bunuel. Together the stories present an ambitious dramatic colloquy on an emerging culture which, at least for its women (and probably for many others), certainly isn't emerging quickly enough.
In "Havva," the first tale, a 9-year-old girl wakes up one morning to learn that she can no longer play with Hassan, the little boy with whom she likes to share ice cream and candy. It's her birthday, and as her mother and grandmother repeatedly inform her, this is the day she becomes a woman.
As the elders fit the fidgety child for her silky black chador (the shawl that covers a woman's hair and body), Havva convinces them to let her play with Hassan one final time because it's only 11 a.m., and she was born at noon. "For God's sake," she begs, "will you let me go please," and you know she's not just using a figure of speech.
Next comes, "Ahoo," a breathtaking story about a woman trying to flee her oppressive life. She's doing it on a bicycle, riding along the ocean among a herd of women in black coveralls - and being pursued on horseback by her husband, who angrily beseeches her to get off of her "devil's mount" and to "get back to your life" as his sleek ebony steed whinnies its disapproval.
This unrelenting chase goes on for nearly 25 tense and dramatic minutes, and after a while, four silver-bearded men from Ahoo's village join the pursuit, like the four horsemen of her own personal apocalypse. All through the trauma, she wears a face of urgent terror, racing in vain against the forces of her patriarchal culture.
Finally, there's "Houra," the quirky tale of a withered old woman who goes on a shopping spree. Soon she's being wheeled through the streets with an army of boys behind her, each one pushing a dolly with a box containing a big-ticket item (stove, refrigerator, furniture, bed). Finally, in a bizarrely Bunuelian turn of events, she unpacks on a beach and sets up house - before sailing away on the ocean on a raft of empty oil barrels and wood.
The theme of escape pursues the characters in The Day I Became a Woman, from Houra's surreal adventure on the high seas, to the neo-Iranian Huck and Tom of "Havva" who build a pint-sized raft of their own. Written by Moshen Makhmalbaf, and directed in a range of interesting and appropriate styles by his wife, Marzieh Meshkini, this thoroughly absorbing film leaves you with the sinking feeling that only a dream will make life more free and satisfying for the women of Iran, and that for these frightened and frustrated women, there's literally no place to run.
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THE WIND WILL CARRY US
Written and directed by Abbas Kiarostami
In a small mountain village in Iran - where the chickens and their peeps speckle the sidewalks like pigeons would in an urban setting, and where men herd their goats through the center of town as two cows hump on the run - an engineer has come from the big city with a crew of workers to undertake a job of some sort.
For the sake of The Wind Will Carry Us, the new drama from Iran's premier filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry, Through the Olive Trees), the particulars of the engineer's presence barely matter: We never see his colleagues, only vaguely discover what he's come to do, and never even learn his name. This harried, middle-aged, urban professional - who dresses in blue jeans, tennis shoes and flannel shirts that stand out among the plainer dress of the townspeople - is on a journey of self-discovery, set among the everyday life of a town where the stone houses are stacked upon one another, sloping in all directions on the hillsides, with one man's ceiling literally forming another man's floor.
Nothing much happens in The Wind Will Carry Us, and yet, from a Western perspective, there's never a dull moment in Kiarostami's ponderous little slice of village life set in Iranian Kurdistan. The dramatic climax slips by in patches of subdued action, and for the engineer, his personal climax is no less lucid and lean: Frustrated by his beckoning home life - an erratic boss, a death in the family he can't attend - he sees a turtle plodding along the roadway and tips it onto its back, leaving it there to right itself in the hot midday sun. This moment of cruelty comes shortly after he hurled some needlessly harsh words at a little boy in town who had done nothing but befriend him, and who is later wise enough to punish the engineer by not acknowledging his contrition.
And so this man makes a mess of things, which he seems to grasp toward the end of his visit as he rides through the countryside on a sputtering motorcycle driven by a doctor who has some sly wisdom to impart. It’s one of many lessons the engineer gradually absorbs from the people he meets: a middle-aged woman who runs a café with stern benevolence, a wizened old man who walks with a thick white cane, a woman who has a baby one day and who's out hanging her laundry the next.
Oddly, we never see the insides of these people's homes, only their porches, facades and alleyways, as if their inner life is something we have no right to invade. And every time the engineer's nagging cell phone rings, he has to shout at the person on the other end to wait until he can drive his dusty SUV to a serenely isolated hilltop outside of town.
Kiarostami's drama abounds with these naturalistic snapshots, and he seems especially interested in paying a low-keyed tribute to the women of his culture, but also to the bright little boy Farzad, who takes an interest in the poetry that the engineer recites, as well as in the woman poet who wrote it.
The Wind Will Carry Us has no big revelations or moments that echo with the profundity of its ancient culture. Kiarostami isn't that kind of bludgeoning filmmaker. He prefers instead to let his metaphors emerge more organically, and to place them in commonplace settings where life goes on. His work is quite satisfying, and its winnowing humanity is universal, even if some of its particulars are not.