“The Silence” - Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1998)

Writer-director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s shifting artistic intentions have always attracted scrutiny. The former teenage Islamist militant began making films in his twenties, shortly after his release from prison during the 1979 Iranian revolution.  These initial films were “thinly disguised religious proselytizing” [1]. In a few years, though, he shifted his attention to general social issues, and later, in the 1990s, he turned to more poetic and Sufi-inspired themes. (However, some critics, e.g. [2], see this later turn as only a cover to avoid state censorship and that Makhmbalbaf continued to be primarily concerned with general social issues.)  So Makhmalbaf’s expressive turning reflected his withdrawal from his initial passionate embrace of rigid Islamist dogma and movement towards his eventual support of the more liberal Iranian Green Movement in 2009.  And of course that makes him fascinating to many observers.  But it wasn’t just a thematic shifting, there was a stylistic shifting, too.  By the time he made Gabbeh (1996) and The Silence (Sokout, 1998), Makhmalbaf was so imbued with Sufic evocations that he had “largely abandoned traditional narrative” [3].  This is what makes The Silence, in particular, a unique and somewhat maddening work [4].  With Makhmalbaf’s abandonment of traditional cinematic narrative, the viewer is left with the challenge of weaving together and making sense of what is presented on screen.

The narrative material in the film, such as it is, is set in Tajikistan and concerns an impoverished 10-year-old boy who is blind.  The boy, Khorshid (played by Tahmineh Normatova), lives alone with his mother (Goibibi Ziadolahyeva), since his father abandoned the family some time earlier.  Their only source of income is Khorshid’s job at a local musical instrument shop and factory where he tunes stringed instruments. 

Equally important in the story is the orphan Nadereh (Nadereh Abdelahyeva), who is a couple of years older than Khorshid and who is looked after by the music shop’s owner.  Because of Khorshid’s blindness, Nadereh must escort Khorshid back and forth every day from the bus terminus to the shop.  She also assists Khorshid with his work, and the two of them are good friends.

Much of what transpires is shown in little vignettes involving Khorshid and Nadereh, and this is presented from their perspectives by showing them in tight closeups or tracking shots in medium closeup.  Since Khorshid is blind, his encounter with the world is through sounds, and the film’s sound track is full of crisp and precise sounds from the world around the two of them. The resulting cinematic perspective is what gives the film an interior feeling that may suggest Sufic resonance with the unfathomably rich world that is always around us, and it is one of the film’s primary virtues.  Incidentally, The Silence was the first Makhmalbaf film that included production credits for all his family members who went on to direct their own films – his wife, Marzieh Meshkini; and his two daughters, Samira Makhmalbaf and Hana Makhmalbaf.

At the beginning of the film, Khorshid’s mother tells him that their landlord is about to evict them if they don’t pay their overdue rent, and they need an advance on Khorshid’s meager salary.  But Khorshid has a problem – his acute sense of hearing leads to him becoming entranced by ambient sounds and music.  In fact we soon learn that his hearing is so sharp that can distinguish between two types of bees – those that gather nectar from flowers and those that land on dung – simply by the subtle differences in their buzzing noises.  His main difficulty is that he becomes attracted by enticing sounds and wanders off in their direction by “following his ears”.  This causes him to be late for work.   So Nadereh gives him some cotton to put in his ears when he rides the bus in order that he not get distracted by enchanting sounds along the way.

Among the vignettes that I liked are the following:

• Early on in the story Nadereh is guiding Khorshid to work and leads him through the crowded bazaar.  Khorshid becomes distracted by the music from a man carrying a cassette player and follows him without Nadereh noticing.  When Nadereh looks around and notices that Khorshid is missing, her task of finding the boy in the huge, crowded bazaar appears to be hopeless.  But she decides to imitate Khorshid by closing her eyes and following her own ears, heading in the direction of whatever enticing music she hears.  Eventually she finds Khorshid this way.
   
• On one occasion in the music shop, Nadereh listens to the sound of Khorshid strumming on a tar instrument and begins dancing to the music.  She has decorated her fingernails with flower petals, and she shows them off while she dances.
   
• Sometimes Khorshid walks through a metalworks section of the bazaar, and he comes to love the sound of the craftsmen hammering on copper kettles and farm tools.  He is particularly enthralled by the rhythmic sound of “ba-ba-ba-BAM”, which he hears everywhere – even when someone knocks on the door.  So he asks the artisans to hammer according to that rhythm, which they obligingly do for him.  (On another occasion Khorshid also tells Nadereh about his fascination with the “ba-ba-ba-BAM” rhythm.)
   
• One time Nadereh takes Khorshid to the river that flows by their town and tells him about her mirror and how it reflects images.  Khorshid is given the mirror to hold, but he drops it, and it breaks into two pieces.  In one piece we can see the reflection of Nadereh’s face, and in the other piece we see Khorshid’s face.

Of course when Khorshid is riding on he bus, he cannot always resist the temptation to remove his cotton earplugs when he suspects music is being played.  One time he does this when a particularly adept tar-playing gypsy is riding on the bus, and Khorshid can’t help following the musician when he gets off the bus.  After some effort, Khorshid finds the gypsy, who takes Khorshid to his clan’s camp by the riverside.   Khorshid asks the gypsy for some money that he can give to his landlord, but the gypsy tells him he has no money.  All the gypsy he can do is play music for the landlord, and, after all, he says, “everyone likes music”.

The end of the movie does not seem to have a resolution in any conventional sense.  The landlord has evidently evicted Khorshid’s mother from their home, and Khorshid has been fired from his job.  At the very end, Khorshid says he is going far away and tells the gypsy musicians to play the “horses gallop” music.  Then he runs off into the metalworks bazaar and begins orchestrating all the artisans there to begin beating in unison to his “ba-ba-ba-BAM” instructions.  As he does so, he throws off his shirt, and a mysterious heavenly light beams down on him from above that illuminates Khorshid’s orchestral conducting.  The music from the hammering metalworkers morphs into a folk-instrumental version of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” (the opening rhythm of which is “ba-ba-ba-BAM”) as the film ends.

Even though there does not seem to be a narrative progression in the film, there are some themes worth mentioning that relate to Sufism – mirrors, music, and femininity.

• Mirrors.  The mirror is an important symbol and metaphor in Sufi poetry [5].  In particular, Makhmalbaf once remarked that Rumi said “truth is a mirror in the hand of God that has been broken into pieces, and everyone picks up one piece and says I’ve got the whole truth, but the whole truth is in the mirror” [6].  This is metaphorically suggested when Khorshid and Nadereh each pick up the broken mirror fragment that reflects their own image.  Also, at the end of the film after Khorshid’s mother has been evicted from their home, she is seen being rowed across the river with her prized possession: a large wall mirror, which is shown reflecting the sun’s image.

• Music.  There are some elements concerning music in this film that come directly from Makhmalbaf’s own experiences.  When he was a child, his religiously conservative grandmother would “make him put his fingers in his ears to avoid hearing the 'evil' music in the streets” [7]. In addition his earliest recollection of Western music was of the first four notes (“ba-ba-ba-BAM”) of Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony” [8]. So perhaps Makhmalbaf associated Beethoven’s famous work with the universality of music – the idea that music transcends the particulars of life’s circumstances and can help elevate one to a holy resonance. 
  
  The film has another direct reference to Rumi in this connection.  It is said that Rumi was walking in the goldsmiths’ bazaar one day, and he became so entranced by their rhythmic hammer beating that he began whirling for several hours right there in the bazaar [9]. So Khorshid’s orchestration of the metalsmiths’ hammering alludes to this parable.

• Femininity. The image of femininity is pervasive in the film, and in fact it is a common feature in many of Makhmalbaf’s films.  This portrayal of femininity has nothing to do with sensuality, but instead evokes something more ethereal and innocent. Khorshid meets many young (and innocent) girls at the food market selling bread and fruit.  There are also many very feminine young women traveling by themselves on the bus when he goes to work.  None of these women are hidden behind hijabs, and indeed Nadereh does not even wear a head scarf (although at one point she is wary of a man she sees on the street bullying girls to don head scarves).  In fact Nadereh’s innocent femininity is a key visual motif in the film, and a considerable amount of screen time is dedicated to displaying it.
  
  But it is not just Nadereh’s femininity that is highlighted.  The principal role of Khorshid is played by Tahmineh Normatova, who is actually a girl!  So all the main players in the film are ultimately of this almost mystical feminine sublimity.

Thus we can say that The Silence is full of Sufi reverie, from its sonorous intonations to its vivid imagery.  But the lack of a narrative flow is a serious deficiency.  It is not enough just to provide a set of arresting images and ask the viewer to put together his or her own narrative (or even artistic construction) out of them. 

Makhmalbaf was evidently influenced and inspired by the Russian Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov.  Indeed Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh appears to be closely modeled after Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969) [10].  And by comparing those two films, one can see the great difference between Parajanov’s mystical artistry and Makhmalbaf’s haphazard and more schematic constructions.  Here in The Silence, too, one feels there are meaningless lapses that seem to be only distractions and disrupt the flow.  Even so, the film does have its moments, especially just watching Nadereh and Khorshid making their way through and connecting with the world around them.
★★★

Notes:

1. Neil Macfarquhar, “An Unlikely Auteur From Iran”, The New York Times, (8 June  1997).  
2. Dennis Grunes, “THE SILENCE (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998)”, Dennis Grunes, (23 February 2007).  
3. Neil Macfarquhar, op. cit.
4. Ian Johnston, “The Silence”, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, (6 February 2006).   
5. John Renard, Historical Dictionary of Sufism, Scarecrow Press, (2006), p. 158.
6. Lloyd Ridgeon, “Listening for an ’Authentic’ Iran: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Film, ‘The Silence’ (Sokut)”, Iranian Intellectuals: 1997-2007, (Lloyd Ridgeon, ed.), Routledge (2013), p. 148.
7. Scott Tobias, “The Silence”, The Onion A. V. Club, (29 March 2002).   
8. Ibid.
9. Lloyd Ridgeon, op. cit., p. 139.
10. James Steffen, The Cinema of Sergei Parajanov, University of Wisconsin Press, (2013), p. 250.

“A Moment of Innocence” - Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1996)

Iranian cinema, reflecting its national culture, has long been fascinated with how our reality is shaped by subjective personal experience.  Since an accurate depiction of what is real generally depends on whose perspective is seen, the boundary between narrative fiction and documentary reality is consequently sometimes blurred. This blurring has sometimes been accentuated in Iranian cinema by the influence of Italian neorealism, which features real locations and has many roles performed by ordinary, off-the-street people playing themselves. As a consequence we sometimes don’t know whether we are watching a documentary or a fiction film (and this ambiguity is often just what the director intends). Iranian writer-director Mohsen Makhmalbaf plays with these issues extensively in his highly praised A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldoon, meaning “Bread and the Flower Vase”, 1996), which concerns a real event from Makhmalbaf’s own life [1]. 

To be sure, Makhmalbaf’s life has not been ordinary – even for an artist.  Born via a temporary marriage in an intensely religious family, the young boy dropped out of school as a teenager and joined a fanatical Islamist group bent on overthrowing the imperial Iranian government and assassinating the Shah.  In 1974 at the age of 17, Makhmalbaf was arrested for stabbing a policeman and sentenced to be executed.  Because he was under the age of 18, though, the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Makhmalbaf was freed five years later during the Iranian Revolution. A Moment of Innocence concerns Makhmalbaf’s attempt to revisit that stabbing incident that took place some twenty years before the making of this film.  As he remarks in the film, he wants to recreate his youth with a camera.

But documenting what has happened in the past can be problematic, especially when one has the right intention of capturing personal motivations and circumstances.  Perhaps efforts to capture these motivations is why Iranian documentary films sometimes wander off into staged reenactments of relevant events, often with the original participants replaying their roles in the staged productions (cf., for example, Sepideh - Reaching for the Stars [2], 2013).  A fascinating exploration of issues associated with this kind of cinematic narrative reexamination is Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), a documentary film in which Makhmalbaf was an onscreen participant.  Close-Up had the interesting, but complicating, feature of self-reflectively incorporating within its subject matter the film-making process of its own construction.  It is not unreasonable to assume that Makhmalbaf’s participation in that earlier film influenced his further documentary narrative excursion in A Moment of Innocence.

The key triggering event for Makhmalbaf’s choosing to make this film, though, was when the very same policeman that he had stabbed back in 1974, Mirhadi Tayebi, unexpectedly showed up for Makhmalbaf’s open casting call in connection with his 1994 documentary production Salam Cinema [3].  Tayebi was at this point an ex-policeman looking for work as an actor, and Makhmalbaf decided to make a film with Tayebi’s participation about what had happened between them back in 1974.

So now with A Moment of Innocence, we have two men with presumably different perspectives attempting to recreate the reality of what happened twenty years earlier.  And somewhat like Close-Up, this film reflexively examines, sometimes mischievously, the process of its own making.  This is what makes A Moment of Innocence either something of an intriguing game or just maddeningly disconcerting, depending on your tastes.

The film opens with Tayebi approaching Makhmalbaf’s residence and asking his daughter Hana (Mohsen is not at home at the time) if he can have a part in Mohsen’s new film.  Tayebi displays evident humility and shows no signs of resentment towards the man who had almost killed him twenty years earlier.  Evidently Tayebi is hired, because the next scenes show the open casting calls for people to play the roles of the young Makhmalbaf and the young Tayebi in the upcoming film about the stabbing. 

Makhmalbaf selects a teenage applicant not for his acting abilities but because the boy apparently represents the youthful embodiment of Mohsen’s inner self: an idealist bent on saving the world.  For his part, Tayebi similarly selects a self-confident young tough who he sees as an idealization of himself back then. But Makhmalbaf overrules Tayebi’s choice and to the latter’s disappointment selects a less masculine and more awkward young man to play the role of the young policeman.

So now, in this film, Makhmalbaf has the job of preparing the boy chosen to play the young Makhmalbaf, and similarly Tayebi has to do the same thing for the boy who is to play the young policeman.  Much of the rest of the film shows these two pairings going about their preparations for the filming in parallel fashion, and this is where we start to see the different narrative layers being laid out before the viewer.  Occasionally these two narrative threads intersect, and on such occasions a shot that had earlier appeared in the context of one sub-narrative perspective (e.g. the young policeman perspective) is repeated, but this time is now seen in the context of another sub-narrative perspective (e.g. the young Makhmalbaf perspective).

In the mini-story that is intended to be filmed (the film within this film, so to speak), there is no backstory presented – only the actual stabbing incident seems to be on the menu.  Makhmalbaf’s intention at that past moment in 1974 was to steal the policeman’s gun in order to use it in a later effort to assassinate the Shah.  And to help accomplish his task back then, Makhmalbaf had elicited his girlfriend (who was also his cousin) to momentarily distract the policeman so that he could make a quick grab of the gun.  But the operation was botched, and after the stabbing both Makhmalbaf and his cousin were arrested.  So in this sparse retelling of what happened there are only three characters to be shown:

1. the young policeman
2. the young Makhmalbaf
3. Makhmalbaf’s female cousin.

This sounds simple enough, but remember that there are multiple, overlapping narrative perspectives for this film-within-a-film.  Consider first what happens in a typical film in which there may be a number of characters.  As the narrative focalization shifts to any of them, we see events from the perspective of that focalization and empathize with that given character.  In some films there may only be a single focalization throughout, and we see everything from a single perspective. Things get more complicated, however, when there are multiple focalizations associated with narrative perspectives that overlap, as in A Moment of Innocence.

In this connection there are multiple perspectives with respect to each of the principal characters.  For example with respect to the young Makhmalbaf there are, at least, the following perspectives:

• There is the perspective that the viewer constructs out of the material presented in the film of the 17-year-old boy.  Let us designate this particular perspective on the young Makhmalbaf as “YM1".
• There is also the perspective that the teenage actor has on the role he is playing (YM2).  The viewer is aware that the idealistic young actor may have a somewhat different perspective on this character.
• Then there is the perspective that the 38-year-old Makhmalbaf shown in the film has on his former self (YM3).  We know that it was instilled with idealistic enthusiasm, but we also know that it included violent hatred and rigid doctrine that motivated his interests in assassinating the Shah.

With respect to the young policeman, Tayebi, there are also multiple perspectives of interest:

• There is again the perspective that the viewer constructs on his or her own of the 20-year-old policeman (YP1).
• And there is the perspective that the naive 20-year-old evinces towards the role he is playing of the young policeman (YP2).
• There is also the perspective that the 40-year-old Tayebi shown in the film has on his former self (YP3).  In particular, his major regret about that incident twenty years earlier was not that he was stabbed and almost killed but that it cost him the chance to approach the girl he had fallen in love with while on the beat. 

With respect to the young girl accomplice of Makhmalbaf, there are again several perspectives.  In the film as shown, Makhmalbaf contacts his cousin and former girlfriend, who had married someone else after her prison release and raised a family, in the hopes of getting the woman’s daughter to play the role of the accomplice.  The cousin ultimate refused to give her permission for this, so Makhmalbaf engaged instead the cousin of the actor playing his younger self in the film (YM2) to play the role of the girl.  So there are at least these four perspectives of interest:

• the perspective the viewer constructs of the girl (YG1)
• the perspective Makhmalbaf’s cousin has on the girl (YG2)
• the perspective YG2's daughter has on the girl (YG3)
• the perspective YM2's cousin, who winds up getting the part, has on the girl (YG4)

The perspectives that Makhmalbaf and Tayebi have on their younger selves (YM3 and YP3) are now (in 1996) colored by changes that have occurred in their lives over the ensuing twenty years.  Makhmalbaf was a rigid Islamic revolutionary in 1974 and upon his release from prison he took up filmmaking and became a prolific propaganda mouthpiece for the Islamic Republic regime. But over time he began to widen his scope and moderate his views, which led to severe criticism from the regime’s hardliners.  He ultimately left the country in 2005 to live in France.  Later he supported the progressive Green Movement in the controversial 2009 elections and was consequently subjected to four assassination attempts organized by the Iranian Supreme Leader [4]. He has since traveled to Israel to attend film festivals in an attempt to promote social harmony and tolerance.  So the idealist Makhmalbaf has moved from a hardline stance to a more compassionate one. 

Tayebi, at least as shown in this film, may have moved the other way.  He had been in love with a woman whom he thought was flirting with him while he was on duty.  He only realizes during the presented making of this film that the woman he loved was actually Makhmalbaf’s cousin-accomplice.  We (and he) can only assume that her earlier approaches towards Tayebi were merely contrived to set him up, and this thought makes him bitter and want to abandon the production.

Although that is the key dramatic revelation that comes out in the filmmaking process,  Makhmalbaf seems primarily interested in saying something about the difficulties of accurately dramatizing past events. And this he does by intentionally mixing up some of the roles in this story.  At one point Makhmalbaf’s cousin’s daughter (YG3) and the young-Makhmalbaf actor (YM2) seem to be operating as if they really are YG1 and YM1.  There are other situations presented that suggest a further mixing of such perspectives, such as, during the filming, when Tayebi recognizes the girl approaching the young policeman as his past love.  This is what makes the film something of a comedy to some viewers, but I didn’t see the overall point to this gameplay.  Thus, despite the general excellence of the film’s cinematography and editing, I thought the film lacked a compelling narrative flow and instead wallowed too much of the time in its characterological trickery.

Note that what characterized Makhmalbaf’s overall word-view back then, and later, too, was social justice; while Tayebi’s overall stance was dominated by all-consuming romantic love.  Both of these worthy intentions are shown to have been present in the original incident, but they were stymied by thoughts and instruments of punishment and violence. The young people who have been recruited to play the roles of the 1974 characters, however, have no such instincts for malevolence and seem to be entirely open, considerate, and, well, innocent.  They don’t have stored-up resentment inside them and cannot sympathize with the violent action in which they have been chosen to participate.  The final image of the film glosses over whatever violent motivations may have led to that moment and instead emphasizes the inherent innocence of those younger people.  Both men were in love with the girl, and what we see at the end are only offering gestures of benevolence.

★★★
                                               
Notes:

1. Opinions are mixed, however.  Some see the film as an all-time great, while others dismiss it entirely.  cf.
• Stewart Klawans, "Innocents Abroad", The Nation, (11 November 1999).
• Mick Lasalle, "Everything Lost in the Translation", San Francisco Chronicle, (10 March 2000).
2. Sepideh - Reaching for the Stars, The Film Sufi, (8 August 2014).
3. Salam Cinema is also a self-referencing and reflexive exploration of documentary realism.
4. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, "Why I tried to kill the Shah of Iran - filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf interviewed", Post Magazine, South China Morning Post (10 April 2015).

Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf:

• A Moment of Innocence (Nun va Goldoon) - Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1996)
• The Silence (Sokout) - Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1998)
• The Day I Became a Woman (Roozi ke Zan Shodam) - Marzieh Meshkini (2000)

“The Day I Became a Woman” - Marzieh Meshkini (2000)

The Day I Became a Woman (Roozi ke Zan Shodam, 2000) offers a thematic perspective on the plight of women (in Iran, presumably, and similar societies) in three separate allegorical segments. Each of the segments shows a woman at a different stage of life and the way societal restrictions severely confine her.  These three 24-minute tales were allegedly planned as three short films, since the approval process for short films made in Iran is more relaxed than that for feature films [1].  But collectively, they offer a more disturbing picture. What is distinctive about this film, though, is the surreal nature of the presentation.  Although the events depicted are physically realizable, there is a dreamlike feeling to each of the stories.

The film was directed by Marzieh Meshkini, the wife of noted Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who also had a significant hand in the production.  After establishing himself as a major film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf founded the Makhmalbaf Film House in 1996, which is both a film school and a production house.  Among its graduates are Mohsen’s wife and his three children, all three of whom received major film production credits as teenagers. His wife Marzieh has worked as a film director, cinematographer, and scriptwriter.  His daughter Samira is a director and scriptwriter  (The Apple, 1998; Blackboards, 2000). His daughter Hana is also a director (Buda as Sharm Foru Rikht, 2007). And his son Maysam is a film editor. It is not surprising then that most of the films they have produced have involved family collaboration. In the case of The Day I Became a Woman, Mohsen was the producer, Marzieh and Mohsen were the script writers, and Maysam co-edited the film (with Shahrzad Pouya).  Because the experienced Mohsen was involved in all those films, some people believe that he is the real director and auteur behind all the films coming out of Makhmalbaf Film House; nevertheless, there is evidence seems to refute that claim and to credit the family members with real contributions [2].

All three segments take place on Kish Island, which is an Iranian resort center and international trading post in the Persian Gulf.  Because of its location, the island’s native population features a mixture of ethnic peoples and colors.  But race is not so much an issue here; gender is.

1.  Hava (Farsi for “Eve”)
The first segment involves a young girl, Hava, who wakes up on the morning of her 9th birthday and is informed that she has now “become a woman”. That means that she can no longer associate with her boy playmates in the neighborhood and that she must now begin wearing the chador, a full-lengthed veil for women in Iran. After some discussion with her mother and grandmother, Hava learns that she was born at 12 noon, so she argues that she isn’t really nine years old until noon of the present day.  Thus since it is now about 11 o’clock, she has one hour of freedom left.

Hava rushes off to play with her best friend, Hassan, but she finds that he has been grounded at his home for not doing his homework.  She goes off to buy some sweets for him, and returns just before noon to hand him some sweets through his window.  Their innocent childhood intimacy is highlighted by a scene showing them alternatively licking the same Tootsie-roll pop that she holds out to him with her extended arm.

Finally the high noon time arrives, and Hava’s mother arrives to cloak her with a chador and whisk her away forever from her previously open and fun-filled life.

2.  Ahoo (Farsi for “deer”)
The most arresting of the three tales shows a number of women, fully clothed in chadors, engaged in a long-distance bicycle race.  Apparently Kish island is (at least at that time) the only place in Iran where women are allowed to ride bicycles in public. But even there, the idea of women riding a bicycle is not fully accepted by everyone.  As the women cyclists race down a country ride, a man on horseback rushes upon them looking for his wife, Ahoo, who is one of the riders. He orders her to desist from this disgraceful activity, and when she persists with her racing, he rushes off to get a mullah.  When Ahoo’s husband soon rejoins the racers, he is accompanied this time by a mullah, also on horseback.  Losing no time at all, the shouting mullah pronounces an on-the-fly divorce, even as Ahoo continues racing down the highway.

Later Ahoo’s elder family members also ride up on horseback and insist that by participating in the race, she is ruining her family’s honor.  But Ahoo continues on in the race anyway.  Finally her brothers arrange an ambush for the poor woman and force her to stop so they can confiscate her bicycle.

All through this segment Ahoo has very few spoken words.  Her situation is expressed visually by the racing cyclists, the intrusive horseback riders, and Ahoo’s facial expressions.

3.  Hoora (Farsi for “nymph”)
Because Kish island offers duty-free merchandise, it attracts lots of bargain hunters and has a large shopping center.  An elderly spinster, Hoora, arrives at the airport and hires one of the numerous young boys looking for work to wheel her around the shopping area in a wheelchair.  The woman has just come into a large inheritance, and her goal is to buy all the nice household items that she had missed out on in her life.  In short order Hoora has a parade of young boys trucking her vast range of purchased items, which includes a refrigerator, a stove, a bed sets, dressers, and chairs.

Since she wants to look at what she has bought to see if she has forgotten anything, she arranges for the boys to take all her purchases to the beach and set them up for display.   But it is natural for anyone to ask what does this old and enfeebled woman want all this stuff for?  It would seem that the real thing that she missed out on in life was not furnishings, but being a mother.  In fact she asks her boy hireling if she could adopt him as her son and, reminiscing about her past, says to him,

 “If that lousy bastard had married me, I would have a son like you.”

But the boy has parents of his own and is unavailable to be the woman’s adopted son.

Near the end of this segment, two of the bicycle racers from the Ahoo segment arrive and gaze at Hoora’s merchandise arrayed out on the beach. 

Eventually all the boys are engaged to repack Ahoo’s merchandise and put it all on their makeshift rafts so that they can transport her goods to a ship anchored off the beach.  At the very end we also see Hava, now clad in her chador, watching wistfully from a distance.

Ultimately Hava winsomely just wanted to play; Ahoo determinedly wanted to participate; and Hoora feistily wanted finally to have a life.  All three women just wanted to be and to do.  But severe social restrictions got in the way. An Iranian friend complained that this film did not present a realistic portrayal of how women live in Iran.  But the point here is not to present strict realism but to evoke an atmosphere, a mood.

Of the three tales of The Day I Became a Woman, the first two are the more successful, mainly  because they offer compelling visual metaphors of women in confinement.  There isn’t so much dialogue; it is the situational circumstances, themselves, that hit home. The final tale, though, is a bit too ludicrous for my taste.  The elderly Hoora is innocent in her own way – her confined life has left her with no vision of life’s richness beyond household appliances.  But she doesn’t evoke our sympathies the way Hava and Ahoo do.

In this regard it is interesting to consider the aesthetics behind The Day I Became a Woman and how they relate to the general production style of Makhmalbaf Film House.  The beauty of this film lies in its imagery, not so much in any narrative movement of the story.  The film dwells visually on fascinating situations, which don’t really evolve much.  Yet these situations are elegantly portrayed.  This might lead one to imagine the contrast between visual imagery (which might suggest paintings) and written text (which might suggest stories, hence narrative movement).  Does this imply that Makhmalbaf Film House focuses on the visual image over text?  Not necessarily. It’s a bit more complicated than that.  In fact film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum has compared Mohsen Makhmalbaf to Abbas Kiarostami and noted that Makhmalbaf started out as a playwright and has published many of his film scripts, while Kiarostami started out as a graphic artist and rarely uses a script [2].  Yet the films of wordsmith Makhmalbaf are more static, while Kiarostami’s scriptless films have more narrative evolution.

This is where effective collaboration may have come in.  It seems that Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s script contributions to The Day I Became a Woman were merely sketch outlines, while his wife Marzieh Meshkini filled in the visual details [2].  And it in this area, particularly in the first two segments, where the film excels.  So the authorial stamp of the film may come primarily from Marzieh.

Included with the DVD of The Day I Became a Woman that I saw is a “director’s statement” about the film, so let us let Marzieh Meshkini have the last words [3]:

“Eastern societies face a number of elementary problems in spite of their rich cultural backgrounds and their exotic charm.  Being a woman constitutes one of those problems – so much so that people begin worrying about a baby girl from the moment she is born, and at times the mother is consoled with the expression of hope that her next baby will be a boy. Women are given minor roles in society, and consequently they are transformed from producers into mere consumers and burdens to the productive segment of the society.  That is why the birth of a girl is considered an increase in the number of consumers of the family income. 

At the same time, the attitude of society toward women is emotional; women are either mothers or mistresses, and that is why every man tries to gain exclusive possession of his mother and his mistresses. As a result, home becomes the safest place where women can be preserved.

The Day I Became a Woman depicts the position of women for whom their gender poses a social problem.  The film focuses on the lives of women who are imprisoned in the house, not because they are hated but because they are loved – women who have to forgo emotional attachments in order to gain individual independence and active social positions.”

But of course it is not text like the above, however eloquent its expression may be, but those visceral images in the film that long linger in the mind after seeing this film.
★★★

Notes:

1. Marrit Ingman, “The Day I Became a Woman”, The Austin Chronicle, (18 May 2001).
2. Jonathon Rosenbaum, “The Day I Became a Woman”, Chicago Reader, (6 April 2001).
3. Marzieh Meshkini, The Day I Became a Woman, Olive Films, 2005.