An Iranian woman gives birth. A happy event? No, a tragedy. The new-born child is a girl. The wrong sort of procreation incurs patriarchal retribution. Sighs her grandmother: "The in-laws will insist they divorce."
The opening of Jafar Panahi's Iranian-Italian co-production sums up the remainder: a woman's lot under Iran's ayatollahs is not a happy one. She is denied the right to smoke in public, be on the streets unaccompanied by a male relation, trade sex for money, have an abortion.
All such male-imposed taboos are illustrated during the cacophony of one crowded day and night on and off the streets of Tehran by three women, all of them young, judging by what we can see, which is simply their oval faces framed by oppressive black chadors.
Just out of prison on temporary licence, they find they've exchanged their own small cells for a bigger one in which the bars are more inflexible than iron. The camera shadows the women, alert as beetles and as vulnerable to the stamp of authority, as they crouch and scuttle in and out of the city bustle. It picks up each one's individual encounters with police, militia, family or bureaucracy before passing on to the next: a circle of fractious desperation that ends where it begins - back in jail.
The sheer unfamiliarity and variety of streetlife fascinates, even if our understanding falters on the laws that rule gender in this theocracy. But it's not a totally heartless film. Rules can be broken, and sometimes are in the women's favour, though only after abasement and pleading: a bus company clerk (male) finds a last-minute seat for one unattached woman, provided she tucks herself away in the back; a cocky young draper holds a man's fancy shirt up against an embarrassed soldier so that another of the women may shyly judge what neck size fits her fiancé; and a child, abandoned in her party frock by her mother, catches a police patrol's eye - as she was meant to - and is escorted to a better fate in welfare than she could hope for at home.
Panahi, a former assistant to Kiarostami, observes the constraints on adults as shrewdly as he did the fragility of childhood in his 1995 film The White Balloon, and as compassionately. The Circle, which won the Venice Film Festival's top award last year, doesn't show the physical side of coercion endured by the women. One of them has a badly bruised eye: no explanation is offered; it's simply the stigmata of everyday life. An unmarried mothertobe is expelled from home by her father and brothers; but the fierce row over her unwanted pregnancy ensues behind closed doors. A prostitute is arrested, but goes unchecked when she emulates the men and breaks the first rule inside the police van - "No Smoking". The body may be incarcerated in black claddings, but a feminist spirit peeps out between the folds. Some day, we feel, they will be cast off. That such a film can be made under the ceaseless surveillance of authority is itself a victory.
The Circle
Cert: PG
