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Reimagining a Hollywood genre in Tehran

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January 22, 2012|By Saul Austerlitz

Ali-Asghar Shahbazi (left) and Peyman Moadi in A Separation, which opens… (Habib Madjidi/Sony Pictures…)

During the golden age of Hollywood, American film specialized in genre pictures: westerns, war films, gangster films, screwball comedies. One of these genres, once a prominent part of moviegoers’ diets, hardly exists in American film anymore: the women’s picture.

In its heyday, films such as “Stella Dallas’’ and “Mildred Pierce’’ (the 1945 original with Joan Crawford) told and retold a familiar story of the sufferings and sacrifices of women, giving up everything for the sake of their families. Barbara Stanwyck, in the 1937 version of “Stella’’ directed by King Vidor (there had also been a 1925 silent “Stella’’), allows her daughter to abandon her in the name of giving her a better life. Crawford’s Mildred similarly risks her own happiness to please a mercurial daughter. Last year’s Todd Haynes-Kate Winslet HBO miniseries, “Mildred,’’ is perhaps the closest contemporary culture has come to re-creating the form.

Haynes and Winslet aside, the women’s picture is no longer a staple of the American film. The rise of feminism has diminished the symbolic power of tales of women demeaning themselves for the sake of their children or husbands. And the collapse of the studio system has meant far greater freedom for filmmakers - no more Hays Code, no more morality police. So why is it that roles for women other than Meryl Streep seem more paltry, more threadbare, than ever, while in Iran - a country associated with religious theocracy, censorship, and stoning for adultery - the women’s picture is alive and well?

The poet Robert Frost once compared free verse to playing tennis with the net down. If, in American film, the net has been carefully packed away for more than 40 years, Iran’s mullahs maintain careful control over their country’s movies. Rules abound: about political advocacy, about modest dress for women, about appropriate subject matter. And yet, Iranian film has flourished in the past two decades in large part because of its embrace of the form and tone of the women’s picture. Telling stories about women scorned, women abused, and women triumphant, filmmakers such as Asghar Farhadi, the director of the new film “A Separation,’’ Marzieh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Meshkini’s husband), Abbas Kiarostami, and Jafar Panahi have crafted a wedge for a resonant critique of Iran’s copious political and social failings, coded in the familiar language of domesticity. “A Separation’’ opens here Friday.