Women without men

Movie buffs may argue which international film festival more frequently ends up giving prizes to movies few people would want to see: Berlin, Cannes or Venice.

The latter gave its 2009 Silver Lion (an occasional second-tier award) to Shirin Neshat for her direction of Women Without Men, which also earned her the festival's UNICEF award. The city has a record of attracting more commercial fare than others, and rewarding it (as for Sophia Coppola and John Woo in 2010), but this Iranian entry was much more arthouse than commercial.

Neshat (born in Iran in 1957) gained European funding (largely German) for her debut feature, filmed mostly on location in Morocco, employing European technical personnel, a Japanese composer (multi-award and Oscar-winning Ryuichi Sakamoto) and emigre Iranian actors.

The film's screenplay, co-written by Neshat, is based on a short work of the same name by the Iranian novelist, Shahrnoush Parsipour. Written during the 1970s and published early in the 90s, it was soon banned by the Islamic Republic, which had already imprisoned the author four times. She and Neshat, each a daughter of upper middle-class parentage, had already relocated to the USA, where New York-based Neshat is known for her photography and video installations.

Feminist issues inspired the interlocked stories of four women at the time of the 1953 overthrow of the democratically-elected Mosaddegh government and re-imposition of military dictatorship under the Shah, a coup d'etat engineered by Britain with CIA backing (the Western countries protecting their oil interests from Mosaddegh's nationalisation moves). The political environment provides impulses and scenes that move the story forward.

Inevitably, the women hold symbolic roles as the oppressed victims of cultural and religious male chauvinism: a 30-year-old politically-aware spinster subject to her traditionalist brother's demands, an anorexic and over-worked prostitute, an unfulfilled 50-year-old wife of a general, and a conformist girl foolishly holding a flame for the uncaring traditionalist.

They all arrive, by different dramatic routes, at an isolated estate with a vast orchard outside Tehran. Three of them stay there together; the activist returns to the capital to watch political demonstrations. It wasn't clear whether the robed woman was still alive as a resuscitated corpse, or a ghost of the character who'd been seen jumping off her family home's roof and being buried in its garden by her brother.

For its first hour, however, the film was a totally credible allegory, presenting extraordinarily memorable photography, editing, set designs and acting. Neshat's framing and shot composition were finely balanced images of beauty and melancholy, and her Venice award was well deserved. She muted the colours of most of her sets, creating mood-enhancing dominant hues of blue and grey, evoking the cine-verite ambience of B&W film without tripping into a neo-realist documentary style. The final half-hour, however, felt as strained as the screenplay's soap operatics and political parables were.

The Artificial Eye DVD includes 20 minutes of interview statements by Neshat, who stresses her debt to her long-term male partner in life and the film, Shoja Azari, co-credited for direction and screenplay. He appears in extras' guises in the film, Neshat notes, also revealing two interesting cast details. The actress playing the prostitute is a Hungarian replacement (Orsolya Toth), filling in for an Iranian whose exit visa was cancelled (necessitating script re-writes to make her troubled character taciturn and non-verbal). Neatest of the serendipities is the repeat casting of author Parsipour as the brothel madame, a cameo the California-based emigree plays very well (and had already played, for her only other acting credit, in Neshat's 2005 short film, Zarin).