At the beginning of "Under the Skin of the City," Tuba (Golab Adineh), a middle-aged woman who works in a textile mill in Tehran, sits down in front of a documentary film crew to answer some formulaic questions about the pending parliamentary elections. Although she is, as we will soon discover, the tough and articulate matriarch of a striving working-class family, Tuba finds herself flustered and speechless, stumbling over the rehearsed political boilerplate she is expected to deliver. At the movie's end, when the same crew has returned to record her in the act of voting, she has found her voice, and delivers a harangue about the miseries her family has recently suffered - travails that make up the plot of this new film by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, which opens in New York today.
This time, however, the crew encounters technical difficulties, and her impassioned speech goes unrecorded. "I wish somebody would film what's going on right in here," she cries, jabbing at her chest. "Who do you show these films to anyway?"
That question evokes the title of a documentary Ms. Bani-Etemad made in 1992, and up to now the answer has not included American audiences. "Under the Skin of the City" is one of nine features she has made since 1988, but it is the first to be released in this country....
Ms. Bani-Etemad shoots the courtyards and alleyways of Tehran, as well as its fashionable shopping and office districts, with efficient realism, but the crises that wrack Tuba's family could be happening anywhere. Her husband, Mahmoud (Mohsen Ghazi Moradi), who is partially disabled, mostly sits around complaining and feeling sorry for himself, even as he plots with their older son, Abbas (Mohammad Reza Foroutan), to sell the house that is the bedrock of the family's stability.
Abbas, who runs errands for a local garment wholesaler, entertains dreams of upward mobility. He is trying to obtain a visa that will allow him to work in Japan, where he hopes to earn enough money to marry an office worker he has fallen for. Abbas's younger brother, Ali (Ebraheem Sheibani), is a student activist in occasional trouble with the police and rival political factions.
They have two sisters, Mahboubeh (Baran Kowsari, the director's daughter) and Hamideh (Homeira Riazi), whose lives are shadowed by domestic violence. Mahboubeh's best friend, who lives in an adjacent house, is regularly beaten by her brother, and Hamideh is in frequent flight from her brutal husband. Tuba, worn out by factory work, tries to keep the family on an even keel, while Abbas struggles to lift them out of their shabby circumstances, and their good intentions place them frequently at cross-purposes. While the two of them are at the center of the film's swirling, sometimes confusing drama, the real protagonist is the family itself - a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.
There is a great deal of palpable political sentiment in this film: a quiet disgust at the way Tuba and her co-workers are exploited; a simmering contempt at the deeply ingrained habits of male domination; and a weary pessimism about the fantasy of cosmopolitan affluence that Abbas finds so compelling. But Ms. Bani-Etemad is neither hopeless nor didactic, and somehow the calamities that befall Tuba and her children take on the purgative and redeeming force of tragedy. The distraught mother facing the camera at the end is a figure not of pity, but of defiance.
UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY
Directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad; written (in Farsi, with English subtitles) by Ms. Bani-Etemad and Farid Mestafavi; director of photography, Hassein Jafarian; edited by Mastafa Kherghehpoush; production designer, Omid Mohit; produced by Ms. Bani-Etemad and Jahangir Kowsari; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 92 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Golab Adineh (Tuba), Mohammad Reza Foroutan (Abbas), Baran Kowsari (Mahboubeh), Ebraheem Sheibani (Ali), Mohsen Ghazi Moradi (Mahmoud), and Homeira Riazi (Hamideh).
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/movies/14SKIN.html> *****
***** To be heard Of hope and despair: Rakhshan Bani Etemad's Our Times January 23, 2002 The Iranian
Every Monday at the beautifully refurbished Artists' Forum or Khanehy-e Honarmandan on Iranshahr St., a documentary is screened often followed by a Q & A session with the director. The Forum stands on the southern side of a large park. In addition to galleries and workshops for artists, it houses a vegetarian restaurant whose point of pride is a sweet tea made of seven different herbs.
This past Monday, The Forum premiered Rakhshan Bani Etemad's new documentary Roozegar-e Maa (Our Times) and as a testimony to the popularity of Ms. Bani Etemad, the place (which the week before had screened Bahman Kiarostami's "Tabaki" to a relatively empty room) was packed. At six sharp they announced those with seats 150 and higher have to go to the 3rd floor as there no longer was any room in the regular screening hall....
What sets Ms. Bani Etemad apart from other Iranian filmmakers, and in particular Ms. Tahmineh Milani, the other well-known female director, is that while she portrays the depth of despair she never condescends and never victimizes her characters. This is evident in her best-known feature films Nargess and the hugely popular Under the Skin of the City, and now in this documentary.
Roozegar-e Maa is a two-part film. The first is about a group of teenagers (including her daughter Baran Kowsari) who during the most recent presidential elections decided to set up a Khatami campaign headquarter. The second part is about the women who nominated themselves as presidential candidates (none of whom received permission to run), and in particular one woman named Arezou Bayat....
Ms. Bani Etemad and her crew manage to track down some of the 48 women who had nominated themselves as presidential candidates this past year. What was most striking was both how young these women were and how so many of them were lower-middle class or from the urban poor. Several were in their early 20s and almost all of them expressed their motive behind their nominating themselves as helping women in this country.
Most of the scenes were comical in the implausibility of these women's acts; one even went as far as expressing disappointment for not being accepted as a candidate as she was sure she would've gotten more votes than Khatami. What is amazing about the film though is that Ms. Bani Etemad manages, while reflecting the comical side, to imbue in these women's act great meaning and dignity. As she says in a voiceover and as she demonstrates, for these women nominating themselves became a way of asserting their existence and of demanding to be heard.
Ms. Bani Etemad takes up one them, Arezou Bayat's demand to be heard and for the rest of this segment follows her around as she searches for a house for herself, her 9-year-old daughter, and her blind mother. She has a beautifully open face, which reflects all her feelings as she is continually rejected both because she does not have enough money and because she is single. Arezou is 25, twice married, and twice divorced due to the husband's drug addiction. When she is asked why she nominated herself, she responds by saying that she understands this society because she has experienced all that there is to experience. She knows their pain.
In the end, the two parts of the film mesh nicely: The first part ends with the joy of these first-time voters after they have cast their votes for Khatami. The second ends with the information that Arezou did not vote in the presidential elections as her birth certificate was lost in her move from one house to another.
A comparison here can be drawn between the films of Tahmineh Milani and those of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. Both are our most accomplished female directors and both popular inside Iran. But while the women in Milani's films are drawn with wide brushstrokes to maximize the often not-very-subtle messages of her films, those of Bani Etemad are deeply rooted in a network of conditions, relations, and circumstances, victim at some point, victimizer at another.
This could lie at the reason why films such a Two Women or The Hidden Half, both courageous yet loud and melodramatic portraits of very important topics received much more attention abroad than Bani Etemad's Under the Skin of the City, which was a box office hit in Iran last year.
The woman at the heart of Under the Skin of the City (played magnificently by Golaab Adineh) is an ill factory worker who runs her family of five: An invalid husband, two sons, and one teenage daughter. Life constantly works at breaking her but not once does Bani Etemad allow us to victimize her, not once does she allow the audience to give credence to their superior notions of being saviors of the less privileged. She does so by creating a complex portrait of a woman whose womanhood in the Islamic Republic of Iran is merely one of her many dimensions.
In her feature films and now in her documentary Roozegaar-e Maa Bani Etemad offers an alternative form of protest. Shouting obscenities at the world and at others is a common skill practiced by many. Giving dignity in this society to those so often refused it is a skill only a handful possess.
<http://www.iranian.com/NaghmehSohrabi/2002/January/Film/> *****
-- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>