Munis (Shabnam Tolouei) takes up the struggle in Women Without Men.
Women Without Men discourse
By John Esther
Dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom and democracy in Iran -- from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Green Movement of 2009 -- director and co-writer Shirin Neshat’s cinematic adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s titular novel, Women Without Men, is a stirring indictment against the players behind the United States-England backed coup to remove Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and re-in-your-face-state the Shah of Iran to power and keep him there by “the rule of the boots.”
Commencing and concluding with suicide Women Without Men is set over a few summer days in Tehran, 1953, where the narrative of four women ebbs and flows with a poetic magical realism, and not supernaturalism, as they deal with the impending doom of democracy.
The most compelling of the four primary narratives (there were five in the novel), Munis (Shabnam Tolouei) has found a reason to rise to the constitutional challenge as various aspects of patriarchy try to keep her down. Down on the bed is where Zarin (Orsi Tóth) is kept as a prostitute as she slaves for a Madame (played by novelist Parsipur) who, like many minor female characters in the film, is only too willing to oblige men and money. On another hand, Munis’ friend, Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni), keeps herself down mentally until her “innocence” is raped out her.
Not to restrain its viewpoint to younger women caught up in Iran’s great peaceful changes and then awful ones within a matter of two years (the illegal overthrow of Mossadegh was the beginning and end of the only democratically elected government in Iran...for now?), Women Without Men includes an experience too familiar with vulgar patriarchy in the form of Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad). Having had enough of her bourgeois life, she leaves Tehran, purchasing a beautiful orchard just outside the country’s capital.
As the events in the city slowly push these four women together in and outside the orchard where the imagination runs wild with imagery, the bleak streets of peaceful protesters being beaten by the military and hired thugs begins to distill Iran’s culture, freedom and democracy to the orchard and beyond.
A breakthrough of sorts for Iranian cinema, the moment the film starts one knows the film was made without any authorization of Iran’s political/pious elite.
Directed in Morocco by the Iranian-born,/US-resident Neshat and banned in pictures and print form in Iran, Women Without Men shows numerous images of women without their hair being covered. In Iran it is illegal to show a film where a woman does not have her hair covered. (This depraved demand for Persian propriety has lead to an increase in Iranian films set in the outdoors because directors consider it ridiculous for a woman, especially those of the middle and upper classes, to cover their hair while indoors).
Women Without Men is very critical not only of Iranian history but also of the religious zealotry of mid-20th Century Iran (and, as a matter of course, the Islamic Revolution of 1979) that reinforced a patriarchal power structure where women must always obey more laws than men while receiving less benefits for their sacrifices.
And by using its poetic form of silent images and circumventing traditional narrative (to a modest point), the film uses the traditional trope of escape from the cruel world to remind the viewer that many times there is little the reel imagination can do when the real world is really out to get you.
Marked by the music of maestro Ryuichi Sakamoto (The Last Emperor) and marred by minute mistakes in acting, the mis/s-titled Women Without Men (these are women who can hardly escape the might of men but through death) offers multiple mental meanings and meanderings to divide, decide and discuss through its political, personal and poetic discourses -- especially right now as threats to Iran’s theocratic tyranny are waving their democratic demanding heads once again.
