‘Woman and Child' Review: An Unwieldy Iranian Melodrama Sustained by Great Performances and a Gifted Young Director
With four features under his belt, three of them ambitious and sprawling ensemble pieces, 35-year-old Iranian wunderkind Saeed Roustaee is the kind of director who takes a big swing for the fences with each new film. His 2019 drug thriller, Just 6.5, was like The French Connection meets The Wire in contemporary Iran. His 2022 family epic, Leila's Brothers — which, like his new film, premiered in competition in Cannes — had hints of both The Godfather and the searing social dramas of Asghar Farhadi, with some of the best acting in any movie that year.
Roustaee attempts another big swing with Mother and Child, a grandiose modern melodrama filled with love, death, heartache, anger, jealousy, vengeance and possible murder. It's a lot to take in, and not all of it works despite some more great performances, including from regular leading man Payman Maadi (also an early Farhadi regular in About Elly and A Separation). The actor stars opposite a terrific female cast in a story that plays out like a 1950s Hollywood weepie, piling on the tears but not always doing it convincingly. Still, Roustaee's sheer talent comes through in several memorable scenes combining bursts of emotion with the chaos of family life.
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It takes a moment to get oriented in the opening reels, which plunge us into the world of Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar), a widowed mother shuffling between nursing jobs and the care of her children, 14-year-old Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) and 8-year-old Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). Sharing an apartment with her pesty mom (Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee) and younger sis, Mehri (Soha Niasti), the overworked Mahnaz still has time on the side to date Hamid (Maadi), an ambulance driver who desperately wants to marry her.
While the film's primary focus is Mahnaz, the director cuts away early on to Aliyar, a lively but bratty teenage boy who can't help wreaking havoc in class. Roustaee's predilection for epic set-pieces is on display in school scenes involving hundreds of young extras populating manual workshops and overcrowded classrooms. At one point, cinematographer Adib Sobhani's camera cranes up above the schoolyard, showing students and parents separated by a fence that Aliyar accidentally locked.
It's a powerful image and a preview of what happens next: Backed into a corner by Hamid, Mahnaz accepts to get their parents together to negotiate a wedding — because even a 40-something widow does not get to decide whom she marries. Mahnaz sends her kids to stay with their paternal grandad (Hassan Pourshirazi), but everything falls apart when Hamid realizes that he actually prefers the younger Mehri. If that wasn't already a big twist, Roustaee adds a much bigger one when, without warning, we learn that Aliyar has been rushed to the hospital, where he tragically dies.
Not many directors could pile incident upon incident like this and make it work, but when Mahnaz storms into the emergency room to see her son pass away before her eyes, the emotional impact is jarring. And yet that scene, as well as the long mourning period Mahnaz goes through afterwards, is followed by several more melodramatic twists in a scenario that requires a certain level of disbelief. Compared to Roustaee's other films, which were steeped in realism, Woman and Child drifts too far into soap opera/thriller territory in its second half, even if the acting and direction are always top-notch.
Without divulging too much, some of the twists involve Mahnaz getting back at both Hamid and the grandfather, the latter who she believes killed her son. Is she doing it out of desperation, or does she have reasons not to trust either man? Or does she feel responsible for Aliyar's death, having sent him and his sister away so she could arrange a marriage that never happened? The excellent Izadyar, who's another regular of the director's troupe, embodies these conflicts in a chilling turn which sees Mahnaz going through several states of grief, until she decides to take matters into her own hands.
While this film is less focused on social issues than Roustaee's previous work, the effects of Iran's harsh patriarchal system are evident in how the story plays out. A woman and her child may be at the center of the drama, but they have little agency in a country where men set all the rules. Even if Mahnaz tries to fight back legally, the courts are completely stacked against her, leaving no other choice but to break the law herself. Ironically, she winds up emulating the very rebellious behavior she kept chastizing her son for, revealing how the two had a lot more in common than they imagined.
Playing the male lead in a female-driven narrative, Maadi makes Hamid a down-on-his-luck loner who tends to bully all the women around him. He sees a good opportunity for himself in marrying Mahnaz, then an even better one in her younger sister. Why the lovely Mehri falls for such a loser — Hamid is one of the least charming grooms in recent memory — can only by explained by the lack of options available to her.
Even if Roustaee lets the plot get carried away from him, especially in the last act, he gives certain scenes a deeper resonance by underlining the gender and class struggles his characters are all facing. The film's opening shot has Mahnaz sitting in a plastic surgery clinic along with dozens of other Iranian women, all of them wearing chemical masks to help them look younger or better. Other memorable images include a tracking shot over children's graves in the cemetery where Aliyar is buried, and an outdoor lot filled with parked ambulances that Mahnaz rents to unhoused families for the night.
Such details elevate Woman and Child above your average drama, pinpointing how the crazy decisions made by Mahnaz and the others result from a society that's constantly pushing down on them. As unwieldy as some of this movie is, much of it proves that Roustaee remains a gifted young director who surely has more stories to tell.
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