Arts Extra: Iran's Newest Wave

Newsweek: Newsweek Web Exclusive - April 12, 2001 Page 0

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT ARTS EXTRA: IRAN'S NEWEST WAVE TWO BOLD FILMS PROVE THAT ONE OF THE WORLD'S FERTILE GROUNDS FOR CINEMA IS MOVING FORWARD BY MICHAEL J. AGOVINO

"The Day I Became a Woman," a new film by Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini, begins with a simple, and familiar, premise: a child embarks on a journey of discovery. In this rendering, a young girl has one hour before her ninth birthday, the age at which she's required to wear the chador, the loose head-to-toe covering, outside the home. It's an hour she plans to enjoy.

The child, and its unchildlike concerns, has been a leitmotif of what could be called the Iranian Ongoing Wave: to the joy of cineastes; to the annoyance of the proudly low-brow. But Meshkini, the wife of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, a hero of Iranian cinema and author of the laconic screenplay, takes the template and bravely, stirringly, goes somewhere else, this time exploring the condition of women.

In other words, with the debut of Meshkini as a searing new talent and the opening of Jafar Panahi's third film on Friday, also taking on, perhaps more directly, the repression of women, Iranian cinema is still full of invention and craft. And this since the early 1990s. Who said new waves (or next waves) are not supposed to last this long?

"The Day I Became a Woman" is a departure in form, style, even place, as it's filmed on the beguilingly beautiful island of Kish in the Persian Gulf. "It's a free market there, there are malls, it's duty free and the laws are a little more flexible, too," Meshkini said during a recent pass through New York, a fleece sweatshirt and jeans replacing the chador, each of her sharp facial features in relief, even under the poor lighting of a hotel restaurant.

The girl's tale, it turns out, is the first in a triptych that represents three stages of womanhood in the Islamic state. Where the opening vignette is merely well done, the latter two are works of sheer magic and originality not to be forgotten anytime soon. The middle segment introduces us to Ahoo, a young married woman in a cluster of black chadors partaking in a bicycle race along a long, undulating, metaphorical path, parched earth to one side, green ocean to the other. "The color of that water I couldn't find any place else," Meshkini says. "It's basically see-through. And Kish is the only place where women can freely ride bicycles in Iran."

Ahoo is approached by a series of horsemen, her husband included, commanding that she drop out of the race, that she's disgracing the family name and the reputation of her community. But Ahoo is dogged, pedaling on with alpine determination. Along the route, she passes a map that says, in English, "You are here." In Kish, signposts are existential winks.

The final panel-about an old, lonely woman who comes into money and buys a houseful of furniture and appliances that a team of local boys, many of whom are black, arrange just so on the beach-veers firmly into surrealism, territory that's best avoided by filmmakers unless you're Bunuel or Raoul Ruiz, on a good day. (Even Steven Soderbergh swung wildly at the surreal and missed, embarrassingly so, in "Schizopolis.")

But the surrealism is pitch perfect here, handled with supreme confidence and intellect. It's a piece of visual art, painterly and poetic, with a denouement of great resonance.

The 31-year-old Meskini is a little uneasy talking about herself, and ever so evasive about censorship and oppression, as many Iranian directors have to be. About the chador she says: "You cover the hair, the body, but not who someone is." About being part of Iran's "first family" of filmmakers (Makhmalbaf's daughter from a previous marriage, Samira, directed 1997's "The Apple"), she says: "It's something that brings us together as a family. It gives us something to talk about."

Her film suggests the work of Shirin Neshat, the Iranian video-installation artist, Abbas Kiarostami's early shorts, and Makhmalbaf. While Neshat's work has remained in the rarefied precincts of the contemporary art gallery, Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf have been imposing figures on the international film scene, rightful darlings of the upper-echelon festival circuit, and are inspiring disciples.

Besides Meshkini, there is Jafar Panahi, whose third film, "The Circle," opens Friday and also takes on the second-class status of women. Panahi was Kiarostami's assistant and even appeared as himself in the "Through the Olive Trees," the third installment of the master's Koker Trilogy. In 1995, Panahi directed "The White Balloon," the acclaimed neorealist story of a girl in search of the plumpest pet goldfish told in real time, which Kiarostami scripted. It won the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and even earned a modest buck in the United States.

"I wanted to learn from Kiarostami," he says in Farsi through the translator Jamsheed Akrami, who himself just directed the documentary "Friendly Persuasion: Iranian Cinema After the Revolution." "He was meticulous with respect to detail and realizing what an important rule these details play in the larger scheme of the movie."

Two years later, Panahi, whose family is from the Azerbaijani provinces of northern Iran, directed "The Mirror," a movie within a movie (there's that looming Kiarostami again) about a little girl who abandons the film set she's supposedly working on and goes on a circuitous trip home through the frenetic streets of Tehran. The film didn't get U.S. distribution but won the grand prize at the Locarno Film Festival. In it, the concerns of "The Circle" are foreshadowed: a palm reader in the back of a bus warns of deceptive husbands; an old woman is not permitted by her in-laws to see her grandchild; a debate on a woman's role is overheard, verite-style, in the back of a taxi.

"The Circle," which won Panahi the Golden Lion at Venice, is all its own, though, not a Kiarostami flourish in sight. "I can claim that it's my first film," says the dour, serious 40-year-old. "That it's a Jafar Panahi film." He uses an ensemble cast of professionals and nonprofessionals, panning the Tehran streets for women on the run. They're all prisoners or former prisoners, pariahs in Iran, and are all escaping, hiding, running, lying, not knowing what to do next-get an abortion (but how?), commit suicide, abandon your daughter, turn a trick, run, but run where?

The camera-and the episodic plot-seamlessly passes from one character to the next, without a central protagonist. It's vaguely reminiscent, in structure and title, of Max Ophuls's "La Ronde," though Panahi says he hasn't seen it. It ends where it starts-or, rather, it starts where it ends. Not surprisingly, it's been banned in Iran.

Both films are political, despite what the filmmakers may say-"When I'm trying to produce a work of art," Meshkini says, "I'm interested in humanistic ideas, not politics"-but not overbearingly so. They are told with grace and, yes, with humanism.

Meshkini's hasn't been banned but it only showed in one theater in the entire country, a small movie house in southern Tehran, a poor part of town where few go to the cinema. "If it was banned it would be more dear to the people," she says. "This is actually worse."

Iranian cinema-eight years after in the international splash created by "Through the Olive Trees" and with Kiarostami moving more and more toward ambiguity (something hotly debated in film circles)-appears to be in capable hands. "I'm optimistic," Panahi says. "There's a sense of continuity in our cinema."

And the directors want their work to be seen by American audiences. "We don't have illusions about competing with Hollywood films," he says, "but we are interested in a share in your box office, in attracting American viewers who aren't already converts."

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