ByTowne ByTowne Cinema
ByTowne Cinema
325 Rideau St. Ottawa K1N 5Y4
Info Line: (613) 789-FILM
Women Without Men
Print this pageSilver Lion ~ Venice Film Festival 2009
Showtimes:
No screenings currently scheduled.
Internationally acclaimed visual artist Shirin Neshat is known for her stark, potent photo and video portraits of how women in Islam experience the world. Given a canvas as vast as a feature film, she expands her vision while at the same time connecting it to the history that shaped her.
Adapting Shahrnush Parsipur’s fabulist novella, Neshat returns to the Tehran of the early 1950s, a volatile time that was a crucible for today’s Islamic republic despite being a world away from current conflicts. Roving from the gilded rooms of the rich to the streets where a prostitute plies her trade, Women Without Men weaves together the stories of five women: Mahdokht, struggling with the shameful loss of her virginity; Munis, a middle-aged woman still under the control of her brother; the prostitute Zarin; the virgin Faezeh; and Farrokhlaqa, a matron in high society whose husband is as stifling as the airless rooms that confine her. Each woman seeks freedom in surprising and sometimes shocking ways.
Neshat’s art installations have long worked wonders with the emotional power of film, video and photography, and yet it can still come as a surprise to witness the beauty of her images. Working with cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, she translates Parsipur’s literary magic realism with a visual style that can be at once ethereal and wrenching. Each scene unfolds in a succession of gorgeous shots, yet each scene holds the promise of danger. The sequence in a public bath is a particular standout.
Women Without Men – Parsipur’s title was a response to Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women – is deliberate in its oppositions. The film is set against the era of the American and British-backed coup that brought down Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstalled the Shah, contrasting this political drama with troubling tableaux of women’s intimate lives. In the world of the film, men define and enact broad social forces while women respond with their bodies and souls. In time, the women shape their own world in a garden, made both literal and subtly metaphoric.
– Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival
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