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Tehran Taboo
***
Dir: Ali Soozandeh
Starring: Arash Marandi, Alireza Bayram, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi
(Germany/Iran, 15, 1hr 36mins)
Extramarital sex, abortions, drugs and alcohol: common elements to Western filmmaking but rarely seen at all in Iranian cinema, courtesy of strict censorship. Tehran Taboo certainly isn’t being openly viewed in the city of its title any time soon. Directed and written by Ali Soozandeh, this is sort-of Iranian film is funded by German and Austrian production companies where it was filmed and recorded – hence the rotoscoped animation bringing to life the smog-ridden backdrops of Tehran, in which no film like this would ever be allowed to be filmed.
The story concerns three women, all suffering under the perils of the highly patriarchal and misogynist strictures of Iranian law, whose paths cross in various ways. One is Sara, firmly middle-class and well-off, currently pregnant but unwilling to have the baby (she has already had two backstreet abortions); the next is to-be-wed Donya – her one night stand with student musician Babak has broken her hymen and means she needs reconstructive surgery to avoid the wrath of her husband; finally there’s Pari, forced into prostitution because of her husband’s imprisonment and looking for a school for her mute son. The three of them all (and indeed, the men around them) all suffer as a result of the restrictive religious moralism around them.
Tehran Taboo is situated firmly in the realm of grim social realism, of the sort that has been a sort-of standard amongst British (and indeed, European) cinema over the years. The story we are told may be in Farsi and set in Tehran, but the language, the mood feels Westernised. That’s no bad thing – this is a well-performed, handsome film. The three interlinked parts all have an emotional punch to them – Donya’s story, with its sense of desperation and panic as time goes on is most powerful.
Yet, the film suffers a bit from its slightly overcooked melodramatic elements. There’s a sense of distance to the grittiness and sordidness of the story – we watch these characters suffer, but there’s no sense of there being any further direction beyond the sense that, yes, life is shit if you’re a woman in Tehran. It lacks the essential, furious drive of Jafar Panahi’s The Circle (2000) or Offside (2006), nor the broken rage of Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Nights of Zayandeh-Rood (1990). All three are banned or heavily-censored in Iran. They all concerned woman’s rights, but they also all contain a sense of the contradictions inherent in the country, they contain a sense of justice that suggests that things will get better, one day at least, and they contain a sense of the country’s intellectual history, an understanding of the path that led to the current point. Tehran Taboo, for all its many strengths, only seems capable of seeing the tragedy of the current moment. It is a fine film, but lacking in that final cutting edge.
words Fedor Tot
Out now in cinemas, in Chapter from Fri 12 Oct. Info: www.chapter.org