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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
CIRCUMSTANCE Sixteen-year-old Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) are Best Friends Forever at school. Atafeh’s lovely, ornate household seems like an oasis where they can ignore the spy show trials and Revolutionary Guard rallies on government TV to illicitly dance and act out songs as if they’re competing on American Idol. A grand piano dominates the living room, where Atafeh’s older brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai), had practiced for a career as a classical pianist, before he gave in to hashish-smoking apathy, and the upscale villa is ominously protected by home security cameras that can’t restrict the curiosity of the teenagers or keep out Western influences. The teens become adept at lying to their families, saying they’re going to sewing class, but underneath their burkhas they wear fashionable outfits to secret dance parties–the soundtrack includes the kind of vibrant contemporary music heard in Brahman Ghobadi’s 2009 underground tour No One Knows About Persian Cats.) As seen in several Iranian films, from jailed director Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold (2003) to Granaz Moussavi’s My Tehran for Sale (2009), these private outlets to let off steam are subject to terrifying crackdowns from the morality police, with round-ups and arrests. Although Atafeh’s parents have the financial resources to bail their daughter if she gets into trouble, Shireen has, stereotypically, limited options for her future. Her parents’ political activities cost them their lives, her uncle has difficulty paying her school tuition, and she’s scared that he will force her into an arranged marriage, or worse. At the same time, depressed Mehran turns more and more to strict Islam to reinforce his rehab from addiction, and, to his liberal father’s surprise, he’s drawn into enforcing the regime’s control by becoming an informer. Unfortunately, Mehran becomes a too rigid and one-dimensional villain jealously and resentfully watching over the two young women as they become closer.
After a morality police party round-up restricts them to
virtual house arrest at Atafeh’s, an oasis becomes quite an intense
hothouse of repressed emotions let loose. (Ironically,
Brian Rigney Hubbard’s
lush cinematography emphasizes the same obsession with sexuality that
the Morality Police has.) Maturing from
school girls to young women, the two friends’ intimate closeness turns
into sexual experimentation, and their adolescent fantasy of running off
to Dubai becomes an ever more desperate solution to the
strictures on their lives. Despite some unconvincing characters, Circumstance gives
the psychic damage of political oppression a visual dimension.
Nora Lee Mandel
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