Veiled anger

Stirrings of feminism in Iran

by Peter Keough

"FESTIVAL OF FILMS FROM IRAN," At the Museum of Fine Arts, November 12 through 27.

Pokémon aside, with such award-winning and audience-pleasing movies as The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, the Iranian cinema rules when it comes to films about and for children. To judge from the entries I've seen at this year's "Festival of Films from Iran" at the Museum of Fine Arts, however, that focus seems to be shifting to another, equally oppressed and powerless social group: women. The lost tradition of Hollywood tearjerkers and "women's pictures" takes on new life in the land where women might have the most to cry about, and where the politically edged melodramas of George Cukor and Douglas Sirk have been taken up by the likes of Tahmineh Milani and Fareidun Jeirain.

These two are the directors, respectively, of Two Women (1999; November 12, at 8 p.m. and November 13 at 11 a.m.) and Red (1999; November 12 at 6 p.m. and November 19 at 6 p.m.), a déjà vu twin bill of domestic abuse. The first, by Milani, one of Iran's pioneering woman filmmakers, is a near allegory of recent Iranian history. A call on hard-hatted Roya's on-site cell phone (she's the distaff side of a go-getting husband-and-wife architect team) snaps her back to her college days in 1982, when the fundamentalist "Cultural Revolution" disrupted her studies. The call is from Fereshteh, Roya's feisty, talented classmate from the sticks, who's distraught because her husband is fighting for his life in a hospital. Roya rushes to the hospital pondering the friend she hasn't seen in ages and the first of many flashbacks unreels, relating Fereshteh's infuriating struggle against patriarchal tyranny and ignorance in this sometimes gripping, sometimes clumsy fable.

Embodying all that's evil in the male-dominated Iranian society in Two Women is Reza Forutan -- who looks like a younger, more sinister Burt Reynolds -- as an obsessive, homicidal stalker. He's back in Jeirain's Red as an obsessive, homicidal husband, and it's a more satisfying film, partly because of its brassy, tabloid take on a true-life story, and partly because Hediye Irani as the beleaguered wife handles herself with Joan Crawford-like sangfroid.

Like one of the case studies in the wry, recent documentary Divorce, Iranian Style gone horribly awry, Red finds Irani's bruised, once-widowed spouse fleeing her husband, her child from another marriage in tow. Brushing off her husband's wheedling apologies and craven threats, she arrives barefoot at her father's bookshop. Dad is reluctant to help her get a divorce: the husband is rich rich, she's a single mother working as a nurse. Neither is the starchy magistrate at court much help, as he convinces her that her progressive psychological torture at her husband's hands is insufficient ground for action.

She agrees to try again, and again, but her husband's sadistic pattern of possessive jealousy, control, and paranoia -- depicted with excruciating clarity by the filmmaker -- only gets worse, and Red hurtles to a melodramatic climax worthy of its title. Both an indictment of the pathological male mindset manifested in every aspect of society and also good trashy fun, Red is far more entertaining and illuminating than any Hollywood Double Jeopardy.

Both Two Women and Red avoid the cinematic self-reflexivity that has been the hallmark of many Iranian films, especially those by reigning genius Abbas Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry). Not so Alireza Davodnezhad's Sweet Agony (1999; November 26 at 8 p.m.). Opening with a paunchy teen who addresses the camera about how he was told making a movie about his problems might help solve them, this exercise in pseudo-documentary consists mostly of unattractive family members arguing with each other. The problem is that the narrator and his hoydenish next-door neighbor have been betrothed since childhood by their parents. Now the parents want to renege because they think the engagement might interfere with the kids' education. Tedious and murky, its forced humor brightened solely by moments with that old standby, a cute child, Sweet Agony is only half accurate in its title.

Fortunately, though, women dominate this festival, and the best film is Dariush Mehrjui's The Lady (1992; November 19 at 8 p.m. and November 20 at 3:45 p.m.). Just released after seven years of censure by Iranian censors, this is one of the least political and most religious of the movies here. Based on Luis Buñuel's Viridiana, it's the tale of a rich woman (Bita Farrahi) abandoned by her philandering husband who opens her house in a desperate fit of charity to impoverished neighbors.

The broad humor and humanity of her guests swell the lady's heart; their meanness and treachery fill her with despair and push her to madness. More akin to Roman Polanski's Repulsion than to the satiric Buñuel film, The Lady is about dread and transcendence rather than social commentary, and the film's meditative rhythms and Farrahi's intense performance (she's like a young Ingrid Bergman) make it a lingering, profound experience -- proving that the good and the saintly are the most oppressed minority of all.