Oh those flashing lights! The celeb-stalking! The paparazzi! The crowds! The red carpet! This could only mean one thing…the return of our beloved city into the cinema world spotlight! That’s right, the 34th Toronto International Film Festival  began just last Thursday, and as always, I’ve been basking in the glory of all the festivities.

I kicked off the Film Festival season with Sharin Neshat’s adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s novella, ‘Women without Men’. Set against the political backdrop of the 1953 Iranian coup d’état that brought down the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh, the film tells the interconnected tales of four women struggling to find freedom in their own personal lives.

Critically acclaimed and even nabbing the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival (the second highest honour), I naturally had high hopes and expectations for Neshat’s supposed masterpiece, but instead, the film left me hopelessly confused all throughout. I went into that theatre expecting a story of empowerment, a story of how women in the Muslim world could rise above the patriarchy and its many barriers and achieve more, demand more. But all I saw was the slightest form of liberation that still left the women desperately unhappy with their lives (Warning: spoilers ahead!).

There is Munis, a thirty year old woman who desperately wants to be involved in the country’s political protests but is suppressed by her brother whose only vision for her is to marriage. So how does she escape this dead end? By throwing herself off the roof of her house. Is this the kind of freedom that we’re advocating here? I sure as hell hope not. But don’t worry, by some miraculous twist of events, she is unburied by her dear friend Faezeh and continues her life as a political activist. Sound crazy? I know…I still don’t quite understand what happened with this story.

Then there’s the devout Faezeh who desperately vies for the attention and love of Munis’ brother and is then raped by two men soon after reviving Munis from the dead. Zarin the prostitute successfully escapes the whorehouse only to die by some unknown cause. Finally, there is Fakhri, a woman of high society who manages to leave her husband in hopes of rekindling a past love, but is left alone and brokenhearted when that love does not come to fruition.

Maybe it’s just me (it did win a prestigious award after all), but Neshat focuses on cinematography and visual aesthetics and abandons the key elements of good story telling. The connection between Iran’s political history to the individual lives of the women is not made explicitly clear. Even the interactions between the women seem cold and distant. In fact, during the Q & A session with Shahrnush Parsipur, the author of the original novella, she stated that a lot of her book was changed for the adaptation. There is no question that Shirin Neshat is an extraordinarily talented visual artist but I have to ask, what is imagery without plot?

Just hoping that the upcoming films on my list won’t leave me as wanting…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Arts, Entertainment, Film, TIFF 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.