Under the Skin of the City (Dir. Rakhshan Bani-Etemad)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

*****   New York Times   March 14, 2003
An Iranian Family, Facing Conflict Within and Beyond
By A. O. SCOTT

At the beginning of "Under the Skin of the City," Tuba (Golab
Adineh), a middle-aged woman who works in a textile mill in Tehran,
sits down in front of a documentary film crew to answer some
formulaic questions about the pending parliamentary elections.
Although she is, as we will soon discover, the tough and articulate
matriarch of a striving working-class family, Tuba finds herself
flustered and speechless, stumbling over the rehearsed political
boilerplate she is expected to deliver. At the movie's end, when the
same crew has returned to record her in the act of voting, she has
found her voice, and delivers a harangue about the miseries her
family has recently suffered - travails that make up the plot of this
new film by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, which opens in New York today.

This time, however, the crew encounters technical difficulties, and
her impassioned speech goes unrecorded. "I wish somebody would film
what's going on right in here," she cries, jabbing at her chest. "Who
do you show these films to anyway?"

That question evokes the title of a documentary Ms. Bani-Etemad made
in 1992, and up to now the answer has not included American
audiences. "Under the Skin of the City" is one of nine features she
has made since 1988, but it is the first to be released in this
country....

Ms. Bani-Etemad shoots the courtyards and alleyways of Tehran, as
well as its fashionable shopping and office districts, with efficient
realism, but the crises that wrack Tuba's family could be happening
anywhere. Her husband, Mahmoud (Mohsen Ghazi Moradi), who is
partially disabled, mostly sits around complaining and feeling sorry
for himself, even as he plots with their older son, Abbas (Mohammad
Reza Foroutan), to sell the house that is the bedrock of the family's
stability.

Abbas, who runs errands for a local garment wholesaler, entertains
dreams of upward mobility. He is trying to obtain a visa that will
allow him to work in Japan, where he hopes to earn enough money to
marry an office worker he has fallen for. Abbas's younger brother,
Ali (Ebraheem Sheibani), is a student activist in occasional trouble
with the police and rival political factions.

They have two sisters, Mahboubeh (Baran Kowsari, the director's
daughter) and Hamideh (Homeira Riazi), whose lives are shadowed by
domestic violence. Mahboubeh's best friend, who lives in an adjacent
house, is regularly beaten by her brother, and Hamideh is in frequent
flight from her brutal husband. Tuba, worn out by factory work, tries
to keep the family on an even keel, while Abbas struggles to lift
them out of their shabby circumstances, and their good intentions
place them frequently at cross-purposes. While the two of them are at
the center of the film's swirling, sometimes confusing drama, the
real protagonist is the family itself - a fragile, complex organism
undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and
indifference of the society around them.

There is a great deal of palpable political sentiment in this film: a
quiet disgust at the way Tuba and her co-workers are exploited; a
simmering contempt at the deeply ingrained habits of male domination;
and a weary pessimism about the fantasy of cosmopolitan affluence
that Abbas finds so compelling. But Ms. Bani-Etemad is neither
hopeless nor didactic, and somehow the calamities that befall Tuba
and her children take on the purgative and redeeming force of
tragedy. The distraught mother facing the camera at the end is a
figure not of pity, but of defiance.

UNDER THE SKIN OF THE CITY

Directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad; written (in Farsi, with English
subtitles) by Ms. Bani-Etemad and Farid Mestafavi; director of
photography, Hassein Jafarian; edited by Mastafa Kherghehpoush;
production designer, Omid Mohit; produced by Ms. Bani-Etemad and
Jahangir Kowsari; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 92
minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Golab Adineh (Tuba), Mohammad Reza Foroutan (Abbas), Baran
Kowsari (Mahboubeh), Ebraheem Sheibani (Ali), Mohsen Ghazi Moradi
(Mahmoud), and Homeira Riazi (Hamideh).

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/movies/14SKIN.html>   *****

*****   To be heard
Of hope and despair:
Rakhshan Bani Etemad's Our Times
January 23, 2002
The Iranian

Every Monday at the beautifully refurbished Artists' Forum or
Khanehy-e Honarmandan on Iranshahr St., a documentary is screened
often followed by a Q & A session with the director. The Forum stands
on the southern side of a large park. In addition to galleries and
workshops for artists, it houses a vegetarian restaurant whose point
of pride is a sweet tea made of seven different herbs.

This past Monday, The Forum premiered Rakhshan Bani Etemad's new
documentary Roozegar-e Maa (Our Times) and as a testimony to the
popularity of Ms. Bani Etemad, the place (which the week before had
screened Bahman Kiarostami's "Tabaki" to a relatively empty room) was
packed. At six sharp they announced those with seats 150 and higher
have to go to the 3rd floor as there no longer was any room in the
regular screening hall....

What sets Ms. Bani Etemad apart from other Iranian filmmakers, and in
particular Ms. Tahmineh Milani, the other well-known female director,
is that while she portrays the depth of despair she never condescends
and never victimizes her characters. This is evident in her
best-known feature films Nargess and the hugely popular Under the
Skin of the City, and now in this documentary.

Roozegar-e Maa is a two-part film. The first is about a group of
teenagers (including her daughter Baran Kowsari) who during the most
recent presidential elections decided to set up a Khatami campaign
headquarter. The second part is about the women who nominated
themselves as presidential candidates (none of whom received
permission to run), and in particular one woman named Arezou Bayat....

Ms. Bani Etemad and her crew manage to track down some of the 48
women who had nominated themselves as presidential candidates this
past year. What was most striking was both how young these women were
and how so many of them were lower-middle class or from the urban
poor. Several were in their early 20s and almost all of them
expressed their motive behind their nominating themselves as helping
women in this country.

Most of the scenes were comical in the implausibility of these
women's acts; one even went as far as expressing disappointment for
not being accepted as a candidate as she was sure she would've gotten
more votes than Khatami. What is amazing about the film though is
that Ms. Bani Etemad manages, while reflecting the comical side, to
imbue in these women's act great meaning and dignity. As she says in
a voiceover and as she demonstrates, for these women nominating
themselves became a way of asserting their existence and of demanding
to be heard.

Ms. Bani Etemad takes up one them, Arezou Bayat's demand to be heard
and for the rest of this segment follows her around as she searches
for a house for herself, her 9-year-old daughter, and her blind
mother. She has a beautifully open face, which reflects all her
feelings as she is continually rejected both because she does not
have enough money and because she is single. Arezou is 25, twice
married, and twice divorced due to the husband's drug addiction. When
she is asked why she nominated herself, she responds by saying that
she understands this society because she has experienced all that
there is to experience. She knows their pain.

In the end, the two parts of the film mesh nicely: The first part
ends with the joy of these first-time voters after they have cast
their votes for Khatami. The second ends with the information that
Arezou did not vote in the presidential elections as her birth
certificate was lost in her move from one house to another.

A comparison here can be drawn between the films of Tahmineh Milani
and those of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. Both are our most accomplished
female directors and both popular inside Iran. But while the women in
Milani's films are drawn with wide brushstrokes to maximize the often
not-very-subtle messages of her films, those of Bani Etemad are
deeply rooted in a network of conditions, relations, and
circumstances, victim at some point, victimizer at another.

This could lie at the reason why films such a Two Women or The Hidden
Half, both courageous yet loud and melodramatic portraits of very
important topics received much more attention abroad than Bani
Etemad's Under the Skin of the City, which was a box office hit in
Iran last year.

The woman at the heart of Under the Skin of the City (played
magnificently by Golaab Adineh) is an ill factory worker who runs her
family of five: An invalid husband, two sons, and one teenage
daughter. Life constantly works at breaking her but not once does
Bani Etemad allow us to victimize her, not once does she allow the
audience to give credence to their superior notions of being saviors
of the less privileged. She does so by creating a complex portrait of
a woman whose womanhood in the Islamic Republic of Iran is merely one
of her many dimensions.

In her feature films and now in her documentary Roozegaar-e Maa Bani
Etemad offers an alternative form of protest. Shouting obscenities at
the world and at others is a common skill practiced by many. Giving
dignity in this society to those so often refused it is a skill only
a handful possess.

<http://www.iranian.com/NaghmehSohrabi/2002/January/Film/>   *****
--
Yoshie

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