In the Sydney Film Festival Competition, Shirin Neshat’s 1950s Iranian story Women Without Men screened a day after the first screening of Cannes Palme d’Or winning Thai film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. The two films make for an instructive comparison. Both are by directors who have experience in the creation of gallery installations, their films imbued with unmistakably poetic, dreamlike qualities.
But where Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul allows the irrational to submerge his film (without quite embracing the surrealism that implies), Neshat’s feature is finely balanced between abstraction and the structural discipline of more conventional narrative filmmaking.
While sometimes challenging to follow – thanks in part to magic realist narrative leaps – her film benefits from striking compositions, use of music and fluidity of editing that grips right from the wordless opening scene. A woman is framed against an azure sky as she stands atop a rooftop, an imam’s call to prayer within earshot, and jumps to her doom.
While Western directors have become obsessed with filming violence and bodily damage with ever greater levels of realism and explicitness, New York-based Iranian Neshat is more interested in evoking the desperate sadness of this moment – hair in slow motion against the sky, a black cloak falling to the floor – than its banal corporeal reality. Her approach appears to owe much to the ancient Persian tradition of poetics, and to silent cinema, as well as her own gallery installations.
The film interweaves stories about four Iranian women in 1953, the year when the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a western-backed coup after nationalising the oil industry – ushering in the dictatorship of the Shah, whose eventual overthrow led to today’s authoritarian theocracy.
In a flashback we learn the woman whose death we have witnessed is excited by the local challenge to Britain’s oil blockade but is oppressed by her bullying, strictly Islamic brother. Later sequences will see her resurrected to take part in the nationalist protest movement. The other women are her friend, who is obsessed with marrying her brother; an anorexic prostitute who runs away from her brothel to be found, Ophelia-like, floating near-death in a pond; and a cultured, middle-aged woman who walks out of her oppressive marriage to an army general after an encounter with a cosmopolitan old flame, just returned from overseas. The women’s stories are interlinked.
A straight reading of the narrative as outlined above risks making Women Without Men sound dun and depressing. But Nashat – named best director for the film at Venice last year – ensures this is never the case by finding the poetry within both the public and the private moment. In this she is aided by gorgeous cinematography (by Martin Gschlacht) and colour grading that often evokes the subtleties of 1950s hand-tinted postcards, and a haunting score by Japan’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, among other composers. This is a film that casts quite a spell. It will, I suspect, reward multiple viewings.
