THE TESTAMENT OF DR. CORDELIER (Jean Renoir, 1959)

First things first. Jean Renoir’s dark The Testament of Dr. Cordelier, made for French television, has little to do thematically with Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, on which it’s ostensibly based. For Stevenson’s late Victorian novella addressed a momentous issue: the transformed meaning of Judeo-Christian myth in the face of evolutionism such as Charles Darwin mapped out fifteen years earlier in The Descent of Man. In that titanic work, published a dozen years after his Origin of Species, Darwin described man—the human being—as “descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits . . . [that is properly] classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as the still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys.” Stevenson’s story, which the Scotsman claimed had come to him in a dream, was the waking nightmare of an age, a symbolical attempt to reconcile the biblical origin of the species, that man had been made in God’s image, with the new, disturbing science. The reconciliation that Stevenson implies gives his Strange Case its unsettling fascination: God is a beast, and therefore human evil, rather than confirming the Fall of man, makes of man a true reflection of his Creator. Even today, this skinny book of Stevenson’s knocks one for a loop.

Moreover, although Dr. Jekyll’s fate once he self-experiments takes the form of the proverbial good-evil split in the nature of the human, the story’s complexity argues in another direction, that good Jekyll’s chemically induced metamorphosis into vicious Hyde merely makes apparent man’s morally muddled nature; for Hyde, a close reading of the Strange Case unearths, always was lurking, hiding, inside Dr. Jekyll, behind the façade, as it were, of the properly humane Victorian gentleman. He is the criminality that virtue works mightily to suppress—the beast, Alfred Tennyson, another Victorian writer, reminds us, that we’re in constant danger of reeling back into. This is great stuff—way beyond what any of the numerous Jekyll and Hyde films has to offer.

All that said, Renoir’s version is the finest of these.

Its origin places Renoir at what he perceived to be a crossroads in the evolution of his art. After completing a trilogy marked by theatrical artifice and lavish décor (The Golden Coach, 1952; the astounding French Can-Can, 1954; Elena and the Men, 1956), Renoir turned to actual theater, directing plays for three years. When he returned to cinema, he did so with a distinct sense of striking out in a direction new to him. Like Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood only months later, Renoir began to think of television as the proper medium for expressing the intimacy he desired and, because of the condensed schedule of fast shooting it imposed, for restoring to his work the spontaneity that especially graced it in the ’30s. Hitchcock, of course, was familiar with TV through his immensely popular weekly mystery anthology series; in the main Hitchcock desired to make a theatrical film using simple, relatively primitive television methods in order to meet a self-imposed technical challenge. (The result, Psycho, 1960, is his masterpiece.) On the other hand, Renoir sought self-renewal—a matter of some urgency, perhaps, because his postwar national stature had dimmed the Communard in him from which his filmmaking identity had been inseparable before the war. Renoir himself, now a political conservative, may have needed to know he was still Renoir.

The Testament of Dr. Cordelier was intended for both television broadcasting and theatrical release. (Made in 1959, it was released in 1961, after Psycho.) The shooting method has been thus described by Garbicz and Klinowski: “[B]efore the cameras began to roll actors were rehearsed, as in the theatre, for 15 days; the actual filming took only 10 days and was broken into scenes rather than shots . . . . Up to eight cameras placed at different angles and as many microphones were simultaneously used. The sound was recorded directly. The total cost of the picture was only $76,000. To achieve the desired authenticity, Renoir shot much of the film on location in the streets of Paris, which gave these scenes a strange, frightening quality—the effect first discovered by Murnau in Nosferatu [1922]. Reportedly the scene in which Opale [Hyde] snatches a baby from the pram was improvised[,] and the camera recorded the real reactions of passers-by. To avoid discovery, only one take of each location scene was made.”

The result may be technically disappointing, even shoddy at times, but artistically it is considerable. Above all, Renoir has shifted Stevenson’s concern with society to one of community, achieving something of a coda for his pre-war The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935), perhaps his greatest piece of work. Renoir accomplishes the shift immediately. At night a small child is by herself in the street, prompting Maître Joly (Stevenson’s Utterson) from an upstairs window to note that her parents—her supposed protectors—are being irresponsible. Hyde attacks the child, with such suddenness as to suggest the realization of Joly’s worry and fear for her safety. Joly tears down to pursue the villain as two passers-by tend to the injured girl. The child turns out to be all right; but when the mother, jangled, insists that the culprit be caught, we recall Joly’s earlier remark. The mother allowed the attack by not properly tending to her daughter’s care and welfare. Moreover, if passers-by could come to the child’s rescue, they might have defended her against the attack in the first place. The safety of a child, by implication, is the active responsibility of the entire community.

The incident I have just described opens the film. Renoir’s script thus plunges us right into the middle of the action, depriving us of the usual narrative detail setting up Dr. Jekyll’s—here, Dr. Cordelier’s—self-experiments. Renoir knows that we know the story; but, more than that, he wishes to divorce that story as much as possible from considerations of Cordelier’s dual nature so that we ourselves are implicated in what the doctor does. In effect, it is we, Renoir included, who are responsible for the child’s safety, for the safety of all children, for the safety of the community.

Nor is Renoir done yet with this train of his thought. For, as Jean-Louis Barrault enacts Opale/Hyde in these opening moments when he lunges at the child and takes Joly down with a cane, kicking and kicking him with unbridled menace and glee, it’s unmistakable what he represents: an id unfettered by social or moral constraint. The implication is clear: Opale/Hyde is a part of us. The context of that implication, when the examples of his misbehavior are married to Joly’s opening remark about the child’s not being attended to, also is clear: the threat to the child comes from us—from our divorcing ourselves from the human, social and political community for which we are responsible. Take all the jabs at the film’s technical accomplishment that your ego requires; the fact remains that Renoir has taken familiar material and given it a new slant—a slant that weds it to his own personality and some signature concerns of his.

To be sure, the compound is exceedingly rough, with a general haze preventing the images from achieving Renoirian clarity; and too often we wait in dramatic anticipation of one of Opale’s vicious outbursts. (Barrault is a hoot in this role.) In other words, Renoir’s film is at times sufficiently dull to make us latch onto Opale’s lively mayhem with something like keen enjoyment. As 1959 French horror films go, The Testament of Dr. Cordelier is no Eyes Without a Face by Georges Franju. Still, it provides an interesting negative by which Renoir can reassert something of his bright spirit—the long-ago Leftist who worked for the French Communist Party and, in an incredible run, made masterpiece after masterpiece after masterpiece.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

ALL MY LOVED ONES (Matej Minac, 1999)

The tragedy of Czechoslovakia, including its cutting-up, and the ceding of the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938 as part of the West’s pursuit of a policy of “appeasement” in the hope of averting war: this, and other benchmark events in Czech history before and after the outbreak of World War II, appear in bits of authentic black-and-white newsreels that interrupt the slick, in-color surface of Vsichni moji blízcí (All My Loved Ones), a film about a Jewish Czech family, its peace undone, that is, like countless other families’, families headed for the Holocaust. His father, Jakub Silberstein, gives ten-year-old David his first pair of long pants before turning him over to the kindertransports, the organized transport to British safety of endangered continental Jewish children. Sosa, his girlfriend, is supposed to go with David, but a mix-up in the arrangements delays her departure until September 1, 1939. Sosa’s face at the train station is that of a lost soul, and the imagery evokes our memories of a similarly haunting scene in Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Sosa will not make it to England; there will be no safety for her, no reunion with her play-groom from a secret wedding ceremony. (How René Clément’s 1952 Forbidden Games hangs over this film!) On September 1, Great Britain declares war on Germany following Germany’s invasion of Poland. This aborts the rescue operation. David’s parents might have joined their son also, but the friend to whom they paid a fortune to secure their own safe transport ran off with the money. David will be the lone survivor. Already an uncle of his, a musician, has committed suicide because the Nazis haven’t permitted him to give paid concerts, and because the family of the Gentile girl with whom he fell in love has rejected the possibility of their marriage—this, after the man’s brother, a rabbi, reluctantly gave his consent to it.

Matej Minac’s first film is drawn from the memories of one of the children whom Nicholas Winton, a twentysomething British stockbroker, rescued because, as he puts it in the film, “There was a need.” This child grew up to be Minac’s mother. Winton’s operation rescued more than 600 Czech children—and about 10,000 European children, total. BBC footage of a 1998 reunion between the actual Winton and the actual souls he long ago rescued bring the film to a tidally (and tidily) irresistible close.

So sincere and heart-piercing a film as this mutes formal criticism. Few movies have so disabled me, leaving me (like Winton at the reunion!) helplessly adrift in a sea of tears. By the end, I could scarcely catch my breath.

As much of a formal mess as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), whose popularity surely helped motivate its production, Minac’s film is nonetheless far more appealing. Why?

For one thing, Winton is a genuine hero. What he did is unblemished by controversy. By contrast, of the thousand or so persons Oskar Schindler “rescued,” only about three dozen of those originally on his “list” were left alive at the end of the war—his list, that is, of Jewish prisoners of the Nazis who worked in Schindler’s factory without pay, and a list from which he, an esteemed Nazi Party member, periodically selected souls for extermination, replacing and adding to their numbers with sturdier workers. Minac, then, has no job of whitewashing such as Spielberg had to do—and which Spielberg was blithely willing to do by basing his film on a novel, that is, a piece of fiction, by a Catholic author whose irresponsible aim was to rehabilitate its Catholic subject at the expense of historical accuracy. For another thing, Minac’s film does not focus on Winton, unlike Spielberg’s film, which focuses on Schindler; its focus is the Silbersteins. Because this family is large and various, Minac is able to portray a wide range of Jewish life, including secular, non-observant Jewish life, and this, in turn, enables him to address—through the back door, as it were, without making a labored to-do about it—the degree to which assmilated Jews were trapped between their identities as Czech citizens and their ethnic/religious identities, which, ironically, their enemies insisted upon. Moreover, there is another important issue that Minac is able to address—another way in which Jewish Czechs found themselves trapped, in this instance, between a rock and a hard place: their commitment to the idea of family and their love for their children. Normally, these matters coincide, each informing and strengthening the other. But that is not the case, as here, when parents must sacrifice the idea of family by giving up their children to the possibility of the children’s greater safety away from them. Jakub’s vacillations—his initial unwillingness to be separated from his son—is best understood in the context of this conundrum. By contrast, Schindler’s List—see my piece on it—engages no real issues but merely sentimentally exploits the Holocaust as Spielberg pursues (like Schindler!) profits and peer esteem. If its slickness, structural disarray (because it zigs and zags amongst so many different Silbersteins), and Forbidden Games-clichés as it “enters” the world of the children, David and Sosa, sometimes put us off, All My Loved Ones still retains a charm, an appeal. There is nothing to hate about it,* as there is in the case of Spielberg’s bug-eyed, far more manipulative melodrama.

Jirí Hubac wrote the script—and guess-who briefly plays the friend who sells Jakub the estate in Prague before heading for safety in the United States? Jirí Menzel, the director of Closely Watched Trains (1966).

* However, I would have excised Jakub’s improbable remark that God at times seems anti-Semitic.

B(U)Y THE BOOK

MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=16

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Dennis+Grunes&x=14&y=19

UNFAITHFUL (Adrian Lyne, 2002)

There are any number of reasons why an authentic filmmaker might wish to redo or revise something already done by another authentic filmmaker. Later artists may wish to test their abilities against the earlier artists’ achievement, or they may wish to relocate or update the narrative (or both) in order to see whether these changes will transform the material by reflecting different values and cultural ideas. The remake may simply be a way of declaring one’s love or admiration for another artist and for what the other artist achieved. But why would an inferior artist, really, a commercial entertainer who has few legitimate abilities, negligible interest in context of any sort, and probably no capacity for love or admiration beyond his own narcissism, endeavor to remake such a classic film as Claude Chabrol’s 1968 La femme infidèle? The answer came to me while watching Adrian Lyne’s hollow, sensational and slick Unfaithful: envy—an inferior soul’s unmitigated envy of the formal beauty and depth of intellectual inquiry that such an artist as Chabrol achieved with roughly the same material. (You will find my essay on Chabrol’s film elsewhere on this site.)

There would be no reason for anyone to patronize the sordid trash that Lyne has concocted here were it not for a particular performance. I regret to say so good is this performance, so tenacious and adventurous an exploration of the soul, that the film, while having little else to commend it, begs to be seen. I regret to say I myself will be watching the damn thing again for the depth of humanity this performance discloses. But more about that in due course.

Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife is a complex study of a bourgeois marriage. In a discussion of the film to which both of them have contributed, Robin Wood and Michael Walker thus describe the marriage of Hélène and Charles Desvallées: “In their materialistic prison, surrounded by a society characteri[z]ed by casual and cynical attitudes to love, the couple find no means by which they can express their need for each other.” Hélène takes a lover, and Charles finds out; “the importance of Hélène to [Charles] (not obvious at the start, where she seems merely one ingredient in the existence to which he is habituated) becomes evident as the passion that drives him to kill her lover is slowly and subtly revealed, to Charles as well as to us.” And, in time, to Hélène. Wood and Walker conclude, “The tragic implications of the film arise from the fact that husband and wife begin to understand themselves and each other only when it is too late, the revelations coming through actions that are disastrous and irrecoverable.” At the end of the film, there is a subjective shot that has become legendary; as the police cart him away, Charles looks back at wife and son, at all he loves and is losing, and Chabrol applies a zoom-in while the camera itself is physically withdrawn. (Hitchcock invented this combination for Vertigo ten years earlier.) Thus the camera, moved back, correlates to the movement of the police car, that is, to Charles’s physical separation from family while the zooming in simultaneously—achingly—correlates to his deepest emotion, his desire to hold onto his wife forever. Devastating.

Chabrol drew a splendid performance from Maurice Ronet as Hélène’s lover, Victor. From Michel Bouquet, Chabrol drew an agonizingly touching performance—the performance of Bouquet’s career. Stéphane Audran, Chabrol’s wife at the time, is Hélène.

By comparison, Lyne’s film is all painless. There are harsh words, but the well-heeled suburban New York couple remain intact. The police do nothing to the businessman-husband, now called Edward Sumner. At the end, he and his wife, Constance (some joke, eh?), are parked outside the police station as Edward considers turning himself in. The roll of end-credits pointlessly obscures the action, whipping up an artificial ambiguity, but Edward never seems to emerge from the car. Out of tragic material, with his greedy eye on nothing but profits, Lyne manages as happy an ending as his trace of shame will allow.

Long before this revolting conclusion, let me assure you, the film is mired in Lynear depravity, forsaking nearly all consideration of the three personalities involved for numerous gratuitous scenes of riproaring sexual intercourse (including in a bar restroom stall). By and large (or, for all I know, by and small), Connie isn’t especially deprived of sex at home; Edward, unlike Charles in Chabrol’s film, is demonstrative. Indeed, there is no motivation for her adulterous affair after eleven years of marriage, and it comes as a shock when she ends the affair, for as far as we can tell she wasn’t much bothered by it (although the logistics of her duplicity were shown as taking a toll). Moreover, her lover is (it appears) little more than a child; “. . . and with a kid!” Edward hurls at her—a point confused by the casting, for the wife and her lover seem about the same age, while the husband appears ten or fifteen years older. It’s possible that the two men are somehow linked in Connie’s mind; we learn, after all, that they both keep vodka in the refrigerator. Perhaps the only difference, then, is that the younger man is a bit spryer and rougher, and of course far less humane. The whole thing makes little sense, is an utter mess.

Two of the three lead performances do not help. As swarthy French heartthrob Olivier Martinez plays him, the boy, a city bookseller named Paul Martel, is a cipher—just a kid out for a good time. Diane Lane, who began as a child actress, is dreadful. Emotionally, she is still a juvenile; only her body says “woman.” I don’t know when I’ve seen such an artificial lot of acting—mere emoting, without any psychological coordinates plotted, without the faintest rhyme or reason. In family scenes, Lane truly acts as though she has forgotten that her character is having an affair. Lane is the kind of actor, apparently, who doesn’t think anything through—or can’t; she plays histrionic scenes without any attempt to shape these into a coherent and evolving character. Not everyone would apply this harsh assessment, however. Both the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics’ Circle named her 2002’s best actress.

Richard Gere excels as Edward Sumner, giving his one profound performance since Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990). After thirty-five years of our familiarity with him, Gere in this instance is somehow able to lose himself sufficiently in the part so that we rarely, if ever, think “Richard Gere.” An economy of effort—this is a clean, sharp, unfussy performance—yields a real and riveting, and occasionally heartrending, result. Moreover, Gere’s physicality in one scene, where he is stuck in an elevator with a rug-wrapped corpse, amazes: an electrifying recall of Ronet stuck in an elevator after having murdered his boss and lover’s spouse in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (Frantic, 1957). Lyne, it would appear, has New Wave French cinema on the brain.

The good supporting cast includes Chad Lowe as someone who works for Sumner (whom Sumner discharges for disloyalty), and Kate Burton and Margaret Colin as two of Connie’s friends. Peter Biziou created the moody color cinematography, and Anne V. Coates edited. The authors of the script are Alvin Sargent—remember The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula, 1969)?—and William Broyles Jr.

FIZA (Khalid Mohamed, 2000)

The destruction of the Babri Masjid, a mosque dating back to the sixteenth century, in December 1992 by Hindu extremists triggered the 1993 “Bombay riots” in Mumbai (Bombay), India, which led to more than 1500 deaths among the clashing groups, Muslims and Hindus. Using this recent national tragedy as backdrop, Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, a Bollywood production populated mostly by Hindu actors playing Muslims, centers on a Muslim family, a widow (warmly played by Jaya Bhaduri), her son, Amaan, and her daughter, Fiza. One night, Amaan joins friends in the street and participates in a riot; caught up in the frenzy, he kills a Hindu and vanishes. His mother and sister patiently await his return, but, when he still hasn’t shown up six years later, Fiza begins searching him out. Part of a terrorist group now, the boy she finds is not quite the same one she recalls, and great difficulties befall the family once she has brought him home. Eventually, Amaan’s mother commits suicide, as does Amaan, by proxy, with Fiza herself pulling the trigger.

This is a typical Bollywood film, although during its nearly three-hour length characters burst into song and dance a little less frequently than in other Hindu films. It scarcely matters. Fiza trivializes civil strife in India as relentlessly as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) trivializes the Holocaust. Mohamed has written (along with Javed Siddiqui) and directed a glossy entertainment that converts genuine human misery into soap opera. Like most sentimental films, it is extraordinarily unfeeling. Now and then a significant detail crops up (such as the later Amaan’s wearing a leather jacket, implying that his passage into Islamic terrorism has, ironically, separated him from his faith and its mores), but nothing once lit upon is sounded out and explored. The result is far more superficial than even Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming et al., 1939).

There is something else, just below the surface—the one thing in the film that is below the surface. Although the script is careful to give Fiza a loyal boyfriend, her obsession with her brother sparkles with an air of incest whose only resolution, it appears, arrives when, at his behest as authorities close in on him, she turns on him his phallic gun. There is nothing wrong with brother-sister incest in cinema; it is Fiza’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of these currents (or undercurrents) that becomes ridiculous after a while. Mohamed should have been at least so honest as to clarify that Amaan’s flight from home, along with his plunge into political struggle, may have been partly motivated by his desire to ensure that no incest was consummated between himself and Fiza. As it is, with all this familial sexual stuff hanging in the air, the tone of the film accumulates into a smirk. One wonders whether its implicit slander on the Muslim family is conscious or unconscious on Mohamed’s part—or, as a third alternative, something he simply unwittingly backed into. It should be noted that the siblings are played by two sexy, glamorous young stars, Hrithik Roshan and Karisma Kapoor—actors from whom Indian audiences would normally expect a rush of romance between their characters.

Like most Bollywood films, this one entertains. So what? Certainly we go to the cinema to see works that do more—much more—than that.

TWO WOMEN (Tahmineh Milani, 1999)

On the occasion of her film The Hidden Half (Nimeh-ye penhan, 2001), director Tahmineh Milani was detained for trial by Iran’s Revolutionary Court, which adjudged the film to contain “counterrevolutionary” elements. This court is the premier legal arm of the fundamentalist Islamic clerics who currently have the final say in Iranian social, cultural and political matters. Milani is a woman artist in a male-dominated society that often doesn’t tolerate, let alone extol, freedom of speech. She was sentenced to prison by the court, but appeals from President Mohammad Khatami resulted in her release, although, technically, Milani may be reincarcerated at any time. Previous to The Hidden Half she wrote the script for Two Women (Do zan) in 1991 but, because of its politically sensitive subject matter, was unable to make the film until 1999, two years after Khatami’s election. It is an important fictional document testifying to the maltreatment of women in Iran, but, I regret to say, it is a tiresome, rhetorical, histrionic film that so overplays its hand it fails to convince.

Despite the title, the film is about only one woman: Fereshteh (Niki Karimi, dreadful), who runs afoul of the courts in the earliest years of the Islamic Republic. Fereshteh is an intelligent, ambitious student of architecture in Tehran, and her unhappy lot is occasionally counterpointed by a sister architecture student’s happier life. (Milani herself is married to an architect.) Fereshteh’s trouble consists of the three men in her life: a stalker, her father and her spouse. Intended to blur into a single entity of oppressive maleness, this unholy trio makes Fereshteh’s life a living hell.

Fereshteh’s father did not want his daughter to go to college in the first place; his brother, however, convinced him to give the girl a chance. In Iran, a girl can go to college only with the written permission of either her father or her husband, depending on her marital status.

Fereshteh attracts the attention of a boy, who, insisting on his love for her, wants to marry her and won’t take no for an answer. Hassan hounds her unmercifully, following her everywhere on his motorbike and, at one point, mistaking him for a suitor, tosses acid on Fereshteh’s cousin, ruining his life. Because of this incident, the police become involved; feeling disgraced, Fereshteh’s father blames only his daughter. He feels no concern for Fereshteh’s safety and pulls her out of school—this, against the background of the school’s own travails under Islamic rule. Hassan continues to stalk Fereshteh, precipitating a street accident wherein, fleeing him, Fereshteh runs over a couple of children at play, breaking the bones of one and killing the other. Fereshteh takes no responsibility, but the court trying the matter takes a different view. She is sentenced to pay a steep penalty to the family of the dead boy, further disgracing her own family—again, this is the way her father feels—in the process. Hassan is sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment for harassing her, precipitating the accident, and for scalding Fereshteh’s cousin with acid. His obsessive love has turned to hate, and he vows eventual revenge on Fereshteh. Meanwhile, Fereshteh’s family pressures her into marrying Ahmad, the suitor to whom they have become obligated because it is he who picked up the tab for the monetary penalty that the court imposed.

Ahmad says he will permit Fereshteh to return to school, but he renegs on the promise. On the contrary, insecurity prompts him to turn his wife into a prisoner, monitoring and controlling her every move. She is no longer allowed to telephone Roya, her classmate and best friend. She is no longer allowed to read books. Ahmad imagines that Fereshteh has secret meetings with a lover. The irony, of course, is that Ahmad’s insecurity derives from the fact that he himself compelled Fereshteh into marrying him. This rudimentary psychology is typical of the blunt, unnuanced nature of the film.

Ahmad and Fereshteh have two sons. Throughout their marriage, Ahmad berates his wife until she has lost all sense of self. The courts, though, will not grant her a divorce because Ahmad never lays a hand on her and pays the bills. When she seeks sanctuary at her parents’ home, her mother counsels her to give the marriage time and her father refuses to intervene. She does run away with the children, but Ahmad strong-arms the boys’ return, prompting Fereshteh’s own return when she can bear separation from her children no longer. Upon his release from prison, intent on killing her, Hassan tracks down Fereshteh. One of the last things he says to her is that she should have married him.

Milani has chosen a naturalistic style for her film, but it is at war with the constant speechifying in which Fereshteh indulges, almost as though she had read the script. Fereshteh is ever bemoaning her fate, giving voice to her feelings. Talking to Ahmad proves impossible, so Milani suddenly infuses the proceedings with Fereshteh’s voiceover, Fereshteh, that is, talking to herself or to us, who are by this time as fed up with listening to her complaints as Ahmad is. How much more powerful a film this would have been had Milani allowed us to gather up its theme from its images. But this film proceeds by scenes, not shots, and it very soon collapses into a pile of Fereshteh’s speeches, one after the other. Nor does it help that Milani interrupts narrative chronology for a weird extended flashforward—I guess that’s what it is—that’s dropped in without any sort of transitioning at either end.

This is no Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003) or The Circle (Jafar Panahi, 2000)—outstanding films about the oppressed lot of women in Iran. Two Women is sincere, but it is also heavy-handed, witless and, ultimately, empty.