At the beginning of Tahmineh Milani’s The Hidden Half, an Iranian government official casually notes to his wife that his next case concerns a woman who faces the death penalty for political charges. Prescience on the filmmaker’s part? For Milani herself now faces charges carrying a possible death sentence for making this film. This is the second time she has been taken to task for The Hidden Half. Similar charges back in August seemed to have been dropped after it was noted by no less than Iranian president Mohammad Khatami that arresting someone for a film that had already been approved by state censors seemed "unfair."

Apparently not anymore. Now Milani is being charged with "supporting factions waging war with God" and "misusing the arts in support of counterrevolutionary and armed opposition groups." Her supporters believe that it’s Milani who’s being abused, that she’s a pawn in a power struggle between the more liberal, Western-leaning Khatami and the conservative Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Be that as it may, Milani is expected to appear at the Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday. And even if she doesn’t make it, the film at the center of the firestorm will screen as part of the MFA’s ongoing Festival of Films from Iran series. So what’s the big deal? On the surface, The Hidden Half appears an over-plotted, sometimes corny melodrama, a quaint throwback to Hollywood’s social-problem/"women’s" pictures of the 1950s by such directors as Douglas Sirk, a revival of an old genre devoid of the irony of directors like Rainer Werner Faßbinder.

Some of the devices seem pretty hoary — the voiceover narrator reading a confessional diary floating into a flashback, the dirgelike music surging over sudden revelations, the stagy spectacle of characters announcing devastating disclosures to mirrors or open windows. And the story itself gets convoluted and contrived. But the themes of inveterate social conflict — between rich and poor, men and women, past and present, conformity and self-assertion — ring out with urgency and detachment. No wonder the authorities were pissed; it’s a film that wouldn’t get made even in this country, though we reserve the death penalty for crimes other than shooting subversive movies.

At first glance, subversion seems the farthest thing from the mind of Fereshteh (Niki Karimi), devoted wife of Khosro (Mohammad Nikbin, Milani’s real-life husband), as she pours him tea and feeds their children. When Fereshteh expresses untoward interest in the condemned woman whom Khosro is about to visit to consider a clemency appeal, he dismisses her concern. Not all women, he notes, are as "pure and good" as she.

Little does he know. Like the urbane and successful architect (played also by Karimi) of Milani’s previous film, Two Women (1999), Fereshteh had her wild period back in the late ’70s during the Islamic revolution. As she reveals to Khosro in the diary she slips into his luggage, back when she was in the university, she and fellow radicals pushed Che Guevara (and in one instance, Gary Cooper) and a classless society in the face of intensifying crackdowns by the new Islamic regime.

As it turned out, Fereshteh was less committed to love of the masses than to the more romantic kind. "I want to wear pretty dresses and make-up and fall in love," she reports to one cell meeting, asking why revolutionaries the world over dress alike. So no one is surprised when she does indeed fall for a slick, pompous liberal writer, who in turn is drawn to her because she reminds him of the socialist spitfire he loved in the ’50s who disappeared during a riot after the shah’s takeover . . . In short, to Khosro’s growing consternation (the cuts back to him glowering over the diary are among the film’s cornier conventions), his "pure and good" wife — an adulterer and a dissident — might well have been the woman whose fate he is about to decree.

And now it could be Milani’s fate as well. If she is sentenced to death, however, it won’t be for her most radical film, or even her best. In my opinion that would be Legend of a Sigh (1990), which is also part of the MFA series. Although Sigh couches its insights in the form of a traditional fairy tale, that film is uncompromising and all-encompassing in its indictment of injustice. The Hidden Half seems half-hearted by comparison, no doubt because government censors interfered in its making. What renders it dangerous, though, is its acknowledgment that the downfall of tyranny lies in the recognition of the common humanity of oppressed.

Issue Date: November 8 - 15, 2001

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