Women Without Men - Shirin Neshat

From its title, you’d immediately expect Women Without Men to be a feminist tract, and that’s what you get — sort of. Set amidst the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s, it tells the story of four women, each oppressed by men in some way, and how they find respite. But the film, written and directed by Shirin Neshat from a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, is structured so loosely that it’s all but formless, unable to draw its disparate characters, stories, and themes together into any kind of cohesive whole. What is the film about? A little bit of everything, and nothing.

It starts straightforwardly enough. In a dreamy introduction, a woman falls from a roof, presumably to her death, and continues to narrate as the camera floats into a hidden garden that evokes Eden. Next, we meet four women who will be drawn to this place from their unhappy lives: Munis (Shabnam Toloui), the woman from the roof, who is politically aware despite the discouragement of her strict brother, Amir (Essa Zahir); Faezah (Pegah Ferydoni), Munis’s friend, who is saddened that Amir has chosen another woman to marry; Farrokhlagha (Arita Shahrzad), the wife of a decorated military officer, who regrets not waiting to marry her former lover, an artist with Western sensibilities; and Zarin (Orsolya Tóth), a prostitute with an emaciated body and sickly pallor.

They’re introduced in perfunctory establishing scenes. Munis listens defiantly to news of the revolution on the radio against her brother’s wishes. Zarin lies with a sad, faraway look while men take their pleasure on top of her. Farrokhlagha has an overly soap-operatic scene where she tells her domineering husband how little she cares for him; later we meet her artist friends, who discuss Albert Camus in a way that is less like conversation and more like the screenplay establishing their intellectual cred. Faezah’s backstory is more vague; there’s the suggestion of a gang rape, but unless I missed a crucial scene — or the film was missing a reel — I’m not sure where this revelation came from.

The men are standard-issue examples of cultural chauvinism; they warn their women to know their place and do as their told, but otherwise don’t exert much influence over the plot. Farrokhlagha’s husband, ostensibly an abusive military man, shows no agency at all, disappearing shortly into the narrative and having apparently no opinion about his wife suddenly leaving him to buy a cottage in the countryside.

Neshat is an esteemed visual artist, born in Iran but in exile since 1996 for her depictions of gender politics, and her artistic background is evident. Her camera moves with ethereal grace, and with cinematographer Martin Gschlacht she creates beautiful, painterly compositions. They make the garden refuge lush and otherworldly, an exalted paradise removed from the political tumult all around, and the women in it like Eves without Adam, and doing just fine without the militaristic control of men.

Sadly, Neshat shows much poorer command of story. Things begin to fall apart upon the “death” of Munis, and I put “death” in quotes because she’s shown dying three times and I’m not sure any of them take. At one point she seems to be revived, but how? This touch of the supernatural clashes awkwardly with the film’s prevailing realism, leaving us confused instead of enchanted. Making matters worse is a possible doubling back of the time line, which further obscures an unnecessarily elliptical narrative.

A lot of interesting ideas emerge, but don’t pay off. Munis becomes a Communist, but it’s not clear why. The sociopolitical upheaval, which at first seems like it will reflect and contextualize the feminist theme, at last seems completely divorced from it. We don’t learn much about the revolution, which if you’re not already familiar with the conflict will be difficult to follow. Neshat demonstrates a strong eye, and I’d be interested to see what she could do with a firmer script, but here she left me adrift, and I thought fondly back to a great film from just three years ago that also dealt with womanhood in a fascist Iran: Persepolis, which you should seek out no matter your opinion of this one. Sometimes the best critique of a movie is another movie.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: