THE STORY – Mahnaz, a 40-year-old widowed nurse, struggles with her rebellious son, Aliyar, who has been suspended from school. Family tensions reach a peak during the betrothal ceremony with her new boyfriend Hamid, and a tragic accident occurs. In the aftermath, Mahnaz will be forced to confront betrayal and loss, and to embark on a quest for justice.
THE CAST – Parinaz Izadyar, Payman Maadi, Hasan Pourshirazi, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee & Sahar Goldoost
THE TEAM – Saeed Roustaee (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 131 Minutes
The searing social realist dramas that have served as Iranian cinema’s foremost exports for the past decade-plus had to run out of steam at some point. Not every film can be as crystalline and transparent in its form and purpose as “A Separation,” but that hasn’t stopped filmmaker after filmmaker from trying. It’s practically a formula at this point: Set up an ethical dilemma without someone who’s clearly in the right or clearly in the wrong, illustrate the backward-thinking social mores that led to this quagmire, and let drama ensue. “Woman and Child,” the latest film from Saeed Roustaee, fits this formula to a tee but spends so much time hammering its point into the ground that it blunts the film’s ultimate impact, taking a potentially powerful premise and throwing so much at it that it ends up crumbling under the weight of its own expectations.
Single mother Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar) has been having difficulty keeping up with her life. Her job as a nurse keeps her out of the house most of the day, so her mother (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaee) and sister (Soha Niasti) have been helping with raising her two children. Her eldest, Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi), practically requires a whole team on his own – he’s a class clown attending both a vocational school, where he’s the best gambler, and a middle school, where he’s managed to get to the top of the class by paying others to do his homework with his gambling winnings. The boy has enough charm to get the other kids to look up to him as cool and get adults to look the other way when he gets caught, allowing him to move through life with the nonchalance of someone who has never had to suffer the consequences of his actions. This time, though, he’s gone too far, handing in a homework assignment that his sister only half completed and accidentally breaking off a match in the school’s front gate lock right before students got let out for the day, leaving them stuck inside. Despite Mahnaz’s protestations that the school has not been holding up its end of the bargain as regards his education, the school administrator, Samkhanian (Maziar Seyyedi), is fed up with Aliyar’s bad behavior and suspends him for a short period. This sets off a chain of events that leads to an unspeakable tragedy that pushes Mahnaz to the brink of sanity, leaving her on a ruthless quest for justice.
Roustaee’s screenplay nobly attempts to deepen the story in every scene, piling on one new plot development after another as the film goes on. The problem is that instead of deepening the story, most of these plot complications only reinforce the film’s message about how women are treated in Iranian society. Just because a situation becomes more complicated doesn’t mean it’s more complex, and Roustaee seems to have fallen into this trap. The film has at least five possible endpoints but keeps going and going and going, bloating to a running time of over two hours in the name of piling on its main character.
Thankfully, Izadyar is strong enough to carry the film on her back. The patient naturalism of her performance in the film’s first half comes crumbling down when Mahnaz’s world comes crumbling down around her, at which point she starts leaning into the melodrama of the plot. With wide eyes and trembling chin, Izadyar vibrates with emotion, leaning into the character’s rock-bottom despair with a ferocious intensity that never tilts so far into melodrama that it becomes too much. As the screenplay heaps ever more devastating developments onto Mahnaz’s plate, Izadyar turns her focus inward, seething with righteous fury at those around her who refuse to accept responsibility for their part in what happened. It’s a towering performance that could very well win her the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress prize.
Unfortunately, while the rest of the cast do good work with what they’re given, Roustaee has miscalibrated the likability of several important characters, especially Aliyar. In many ways, Aliyar’s behavior is typical of an early-teen boy. Still, he so thoroughly flouts every rule for selfish gain and is so transparent in his attempts to circumvent facing the consequences that it’s hard to have any sympathy for him or Mahnaz when he gets suspended, which puts the rest of the film’s emotional stakes in jeopardy as well. The rest of the adults – Mahnaz’s mother, sister, and father-in-law (Hasan Pourshirazi), as well as her ambulance driver boyfriend (Payman Maadi) and the school administrators – all have moments of clarity when it comes to the issue at hand, but they spend most of their time passing the blame around to anyone and everyone else but themselves, in a manner that makes it difficult to care for any of them.
This blame game is very much the point of the film, of course, but Roustaee keeps it going around and around so many times that you would get dizzy if the film weren’t so languidly paced. There’s no doubt that the issues at hand are pressing and that they’re symptoms of a society that has coddled men for so long that their own mothers are complicit in letting the bad behavior continue, even when they should know better. While “Woman and Child” manages an ending of ambiguous happiness, it’s spent so long running in thematic circles that the only reason it works is Parinaz Izadyar. No matter how dull the film becomes, she’s always compelling, elevating a film that would be painful to get through without her.
