Women Without Men (2009)
A review of Women Without Men / زنان بدون مردان by Shirin Neshat.
I’m a huge, huge Shirin Neshat fan. And, in a way, that stems from that fact that both of our origins are the same. Her family and mine are both from Qazvin, Iran, and she is only a couple years older than my father. My father had no idea she was famous, and he was very aware of her family—Neshat’s father was my grandmother’s doctor back in the day. The Neshats were a family from my father’s distant past, so that made me even more interested, as Shirin ended up in the United States, making art. And she wasn’t very good at it in the beginning, until she found her calling and found a groove, forming a niche for herself.
I’d heard and read about Women Without Men, but never had the chance to see it until now. It was free via my library’s Kanopy access, so, the day of my birthday, I sat down and watched the film in its entirety. This is a really fascinating film to watch as an Iranian-American, as it captures a time in history where the people are dying or are now gone. Soon we will no longer have people who remember 1953, then the revolution.
Anyways, let’s dive into this review.
Content
This film takes place in 1953, the year where the United States and the British threw a coup in order to instate Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back into power on the Iranian throne. As the protests rage outside, our film takes us into the domestic spaces of women, specifically Munis. Munis is almost thirty years old and is sitting in her room, listening to the radio reports about how the British have seized Iranian oil and how Mossegh, the Prime Minister, wants to nationalize it for themselves. Her brother enters the room and yells at her about how she needs to get married, and that a suitor will be coming that night. Giving a forlorn look, he threatens to break her legs if she tries to leave the house.
We alternate between three different stories after this opening scene. Munis’ story was the beginning one, but we also have the prostitute named Zarin, who seems unwilling to do the work that she’s forced to do, and Fakhri, the wife of a high-ranking general in the Iranian army. At the ceremony where Fakhri’s wife is being honored, an old friend appears, and her husband gets jealous, saying that she no longer sexually satisfies him and that he’ll just leave her.
The three narratives interweaved in this film all demonstrate the struggle women have to go through in Iranian culture, while also dealing with the political pressure outside of their social bubbles. The prostitute Zarin, for example, is clearly anorexic and does not speak a word the entire movie. We see the male gaze prominently within the character of Amir, who is the elder brother of Munis. He is abusive and extremely misogynistic, a product of the world he grew up in.
The entire film is shot on a muted, darker color palette, which is interesting considering the location: Casablanca. It was a substitute for Tehran, since the lead actress and Neshat herself are both banned from Iran. Coloring, however, adds to the sense of helplessness that comes with the women’s situations, showing how they seem unable to escape this bleak world that they are trapped in.
There’s a lot of threads going on in one short film that clocks in at just under two hours, which makes it slightly overwhelming and quite ambitious. I think she does a great job at conveying the story, in an artistic and beautiful manner, but there’s just too much going on in the film at the end of the day.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a beautifully shot film and worth it alone for the shots. It’s a terribly sad story, especially as an Iranian woman who has seen the affect of abuse on women within our society. I grew up in the Iranian-American diaspora community, and there are so many men who privately are so abusive but will act like charmers to your face. The film also offers a glimpse into the domestic lives of women in Iran during the 1950s, although the politics only take a much larger role in, say, the general’s wife’s storyline. It’s a quiet, beautiful movie although it is indeed too ambitious.
