“Aren’t you afraid?” some of my stateside friends asked before I visited Iran for the first time last February. “Only of American bombs,” I replied. Notwithstanding all of the things that are currently illegal there—such as men and women shaking hands or riding in the same sections of buses—I’m not sure I’ve ever been anyplace where people display more social sophistication in terms of hospitality, everyday courtesy, or sheer enterprise in the use of charm and persistence to get what they want. Some of this character came through in Divorce Iranian Style, a fascinating documentary that turned up at the Film Center a couple of years ago showing the aggressive resourcefulness of Iranian women in divorce court, despite the repressive laws they have to work with.
The credits for The Day I Became a Woman, opening this week at Landmark’s Century Centre, list Makhmalbaf as writer and his young wife, Marzieh Meshkini, as director. In the press book he writes, “Five years ago, while I had been the most prolific Iranian filmmaker, with 14 feature films, 3 shorts, 28 books, and 22 editing credits over a 14-year career, I stopped making films and decided to make filmmakers. I started the Makhmalbaf Film House with only eight students selected among family and friends.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Kish Island, located in southern Iran, is, according to the Lonely Planet guide to Iran, “a bizarre place: a little bit of Singapore with highways and towering apartment blocks and hotels; a quasi-Disneyland with theme parks; and a poor man’s California with beaches and bicycle paths—all with a unique Iranian style. The main attraction for Iranians, however, is the availability of duty-free electrical goods.” The beaches are relevant to all three sketches of The Day I Became a Woman, the bicycle paths are relevant to the second, and the highways, theme-park ambience, and electrical goods are relevant to the third. And everything looks gorgeous.
The third heroine, the elderly Houra (Persian for “nymph”), arrives on the island in a wheelchair and hires a local boy to cart her around to shops in the local malls; thanks to a recent inheritance, she has the means to get what she’s always wanted—furniture as well as appliances—and has tied colored strings around each of her fingers to remind her of what she wants. After depositing all of her goods on the beach, she returns to the malls in hopes of remembering the only item that’s skipped her mind, while the boys in the vicinity unpack her goods, install them as if in a living room, and fool around with them. Houra returns around the time that a couple of the women bicyclists and Havva, now dressed in a chador, turn up to watch her leave—along with her goods, which the boys push out to sea on rafts.
I’ve been told that Iranians can be just as color conscious as Americans, so there’s some reason to observe that most of the boys in this movie are black and that Havva herself is fairly dark skinned—hints that there’s an underclass in Iran and maybe that being black and being female are two versions of the same thing. The stories are simple enough, but they’re also poetic in their resonance—intended to make an imprint on our dreams as well as our thoughts.
Directed by Marzieh Meshkini
Written by Mohsen Makhmalbaf
With Fatemeh Cheragh Akhtar, Hassan Nabehan, Shabnam Toloui, Cyrus Kahouri Nejad, Azizeh Seddighi, and Badr Irouni Nejad.
