Sarah Kazemy and Nikohl Boosheri in a fantasy sequence in Maryam Keshavarz's Circumstance
Writer/director Maryam Keshavarz’s
beautiful, disturbing film tells the story of two Iranian high school
girlfriends in Teheran whose growing attraction and love for one another
quickly hits the wall of religious interdiction and oppressive patriarchy. Filmed with a grainy realism, Circumstance is haunted by impending doom, even in its frequent moments of whimsical affection and erotic passionate.
The film’s opening scene sets the
tone, as Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri) and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy) stand among their
young peers in a school yard, all wearing identical, modesty-imposing skirts
and jackets and hijabs that barely hide the two women’s beauty. Shireen slips an origami bird into Atafeh’s
hand, a gesture of fondness weighted with the symbolism of impossible flight
and escape that comes to define the girls’ relationship and their lives.
Although Circumstance follows the young women’s sexual and emotional
relationship in the context of the Iranian theocracy, the film more broadly
addresses the country’s human rights violations against women. A pervasive sense of surveillance quickly becomes
the film’s visual motif. In that first
schoolyard scene, after the headmistress dismisses the girls, we see Atafeh and
Shireen hail a taxi to leave the school grounds. Keshavarz shoots the action from above in
grainy black and white, as if through the lens of a security camera.
The image conveys the intrusive
intimacy of being so closely watched. These
images appear regularly throughout the story, reminding spectators of the
omnipresent eye of the religious authorities whose word holds sway, even as the
two young women seem blissfully unaware of how their every move is observed and
catalogued.
Ata’s brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo
Safai), serves as the family’s in-house surveyor. He returns to the family fold at the film’s
start, after an unexplained absence.
Mehran was a talented musician who’s given up his gift after recovering
from a devastating drug addiction that’s left his father suspicious and his
mother forgiving. Mehran replaces his
passion for music and drugs with religious fanaticism, surprising his wealthy,
secular family with his new commitment to prayer.
Mehran becomes the vehicle through
which Iranian theocracy infiltrates the micro-level of the family unit. His post-addiction paranoia translates into
obsessive spying on his sister and the rest of his family. His eye supplements the state’s, as he
installs cameras around his family’s home through which he observes their every
interaction.
He also collaborates with the
mullahs who become his new compatriots.
When he begins to understand the physical and emotional reality of Ata
and Shireen’s relationship, he engineers a series of confrontations in which
the morality police round up and harass the two girls. Mehran comes to Shireen’s rescue in a way
that forces her to depend on his manufactured generosity and allows him to
manipulate her into an unwanted marriage.
While Ata’s family is well-off and
initially protected from the authoritative whims of the local mullahs,
Shireen’s parents were professors executed as counter-revolutionaries by the
theocratic regime. The beautiful,
doleful young woman lives with her uncle and her grandmother, tenuously
attached to the relatives who tolerate the economic burden of her
presence. Her grandmother adores her; a
scene in which they dance together in the kitchen with a kind of joyous freedom
is lovely, and contrasts sharply with those of her uncle trying to palm her off
on another man by arranging a marriage before Mehran steps in to offer himself.
When Ata and Shireen are arrested
on a fabricated morality charge, the cruel officials accuse Shireen of being a
whore. They belittle her and threaten to
hang her, just as the state hanged her parents.
Ata is fierce on her friend’s behalf, and saved by the sage generosity
of her own father, who bails her out by bribing the unctuous, dangerous mullah. But Shireen knows how limited her options are
without money or a father to rescue her, and becomes trapped by the
impossibility of truly being free as a woman in a deeply patriarchal,
religiously driven social order.
Because Shireen’s lineage already
puts her at a political disadvantage, Keshavarz establishes visually how the
male-embodied state holds power over her very flesh. When Shireen takes a taxi from a party alone,
the driver abuses her sexually, using her for his fetishistic pleasures.
Likewise, Mehran’s patriarchal
hold over Shireen and his sister begins to leech away Shireen’s sexual desire
and control. Watching her degenerate
from a powerfully erotic young woman who plays with men but clearly loves Ata
into a sexually and emotionally subservient wife is one of the film’s many
heart-breaking narrative arcs.
Keshavarz directs her two, fresh
leading actors with subtly and respect.
Boosheri and Kazemy are lovely together as Ata and Shireen,
communicating the stark contrast between what their newly matured bodies want
and what their deeply constrictive public culture allows. They convey their love for one another with
small gestures that Keshavarz captures with simple delicacy—one girl’s finger
curling around the other’s as they stand in line at school or as they walk
together with the men who comprise their social lives; the quick kiss Shireen
gives Ata when she breaks a car window to steal a shimmering handbag she
admires; and especially in the way the girls dance together, alone in Ata’s
room, before Mehran intrudes on their pleasure.
Their physical freedom, and the obvious eroticism of their bond as they dance
together with delight while they watch “American Idol,” is at once moving and
wrenching.
Ata and Shireen’s palpable attraction
to one another provokes anxiety in the film’s spectators, if not in the other
characters, about their fates. But
although Keshavarz keeps the threat of danger flickering around the film, only
the scenes with the mullah and Mehran actualize the dire circumstances in which
the women live. Still, their lives are a
series of close calls, each of which underlines the cost of female resistance
and the gender hypocrisy of Iranian culture.
For example, Ata and Shireen
frequent parties in Teheran’s underground, where young people dance to Western
music, drink, do drugs, and experiment with sex in ways Keshavarz depicts as normal
for 21st century young people.
But these rites of passage are consigned to private homes, which Ata and
Shireen enter by pretending they’re going to sewing circles. Their male friends, on the other hand, can
range freely through Iranian society, without the sartorial or behavioral
constraints that confine the young women.
Keshavarz also complicates the film’s
gender politics by making Ata and Shireen’s male intimates rather harmless,
suggesting that they are constructed into the gendered power of the state,
rather than naturally assuming it. Ata’s
ostensible boyfriend at first seems threatening. When he tries to have sex with Shireen—who
soundly rejects him—he seems fully in command of his sexual power. But he turns out to be innocuous and young.
He and Ata team up with Shireen
and Joey (Keon Mohajeri), a young man who’s gone to school in the U.S. and has
progressive ideas about ideology and politics.
Joey idealistically dreams of dubbing Milk, the American biopic, into Arabic, so that Iranians—he
believes—will be able to see their own situation in the story of gay liberation
in America. He wants his people to be
inspired to change what he, speaking the film’s title, points to as their
dubious circumstances.
Some of the film’s lightest moments
show the four friends trying to speak like Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, or to
simulate the film’s gay sex with the right tone of voice. Joey’s faith that his work will mean
something is touching even though the film clarifies that it’s also naïve and
finally, in the end, fatal.
Circumstance is at its best when Keshavarz more indirectly shows
the oppressions of a culture in which binary gender distinctions are so
determining. When Ata and Shireen join
Ata’s family for a day at the beach, the director stages in the background
another family lounging beside their beach blanket, the mother in full black
dress and hijab while her sons and husband wear revealing swim suits. Ata’s father, Firouz (Soheil Parsa), and
Mehran also enjoy the privilege to inhabit their bodies publically, leaving
their own women behind with only a small backward glance before they run into
the waves.
Later, when
Ata and Shireen find themselves alone by the water as the men are called to
prayer, they take advantage of their exclusion from religious ritual to strip
to their underwear and swim together.
The actors perfectly perform the sensual thrill of floating in your own
skin along the surface of the water with someone you love.
The action in
Circumstance is oblique and subtle,
as characters’ allegiances gradually shift and their commitments change. After Shireen marries Mehran, breaking Ata’s
heart, she creeps into her friend’s room to confess that she wed her brother only
so that she could be close to Ata. Their
sudden freedom to be together with the legitimate excuse of being
sisters-in-law releases their erotic charge even more publicly. At a family party, Ata and Shireen sit beside
one another on a piano bench flirting so seductively, only the culture’s
profound disregard for women’s sexuality would permit anyone to misrecognize
their relationship.
Even Ata’s
mother, Azar (Nasrin Pakkho), is complicit in her refusal to see anything but
what makes her life livable. She’s glad
for her son’s return and unwilling to acknowledge the authoritarian religious
current he brings into her house. Given
Azar’s lack of power, the film suggests she can do little but use her
intentional blindness to help her survive.
Only Ata, in
the end, finds her circumstances untenable.
She sees that her liberal father will inevitably have to acquiesce to the
mullahs to retain his economic, if not political, privilege. She notes with horror as her father begins to
join Mehran’s religious observances.
Ata understands
her world will constrict even further unless she escapes while she can. Following a dream that Shireen first articulated—and
unsuccessfully begging her friend to come along—Ata bribes an official to let
her travel to Dubai without her father’s permission, freeing herself into a
life she imagines will allow her to embody freely the woman she has become.
Circumstance’s ending sounds a few false notes. Perhaps Shireen’s fear of being hanged by the
police is finally enough to force her to capitulate to husband, but in her final
scene, it seems she has also, inexplicably, developed some feeling for him. And occasionally, Keshavarz paints the
mullahs and their henchmen as two-dimensional villains, when the subtlety of
their evil is much more chilling.
Nonetheless,
with its artful yet stark eroticism bumping up against scenes that reveal the
unadulterated cruelty of an oppressive social system, the film is a powerful
indictment of the disempowerment of Iranian women. Circumstance
provides a stirring, important picture of the crushing double standard between
what women desire in private and what they’re allowed in public.
The Feminist
Spectator
