Iranian cinema is your go-to for knotty, complex morality tales. Small missteps are made, a series of seemingly inconsequential events leads to one big, defining one – and the fallout leaves characters trying to navigate the awful repercussions often made worse by the country’s suffocating social and religious codes. A gun goes missing in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig; a handbag is stolen in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Torment and tragedies ensue.
In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.
Hard-working nurse Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar, magnetic) is a 40-year-old widow with two kids: teenage tearaway Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) and all-round poppet Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). She’s dating ambulance driver Hamid (A Separation’s Payman Maadi), an older man whose flirtations suddenly turn serious. He pops the question, but there’s an immediate string attached: will she pretend she’s childless when his strict rural parents come to visit them at her house?
For anyone unfamiliar with the strictures and mores of Iranian society, the answer would be ‘hell no’. But as Roustayi shows in a movie that’s sympathetic to its female protagonist almost to a fault, it’s nothing like that simple. As a single mum, Hamid might be her best bet – even if he immediately scans as something of a rogue and she’s happy to tick along without formalising things. So she cedes to his request, dutifully taking down the portraits of her kids on her apartment walls, and endures the pretence with grace as her own mother (Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee) sits in.
And so the first domino falls in a series of connected events that will leave her broken up and grief-stricken. She’s pushed her kids onto her reluctant father-in-law for the visit. He’s a wheezing misanthrope played with raw unlikeability by Hassan Pourshirazi, and perhaps inevitably, something terrible happens.
For Mahnaz, sadness and regret are not enough. She sets off on a quest for justice for those she blames for the tragedy: neglectful granddad; the teacher she believes had victimised her son; Hamid, who, to compound matters, had decided that he wanted to marry her sister anyway.
The outstanding actress toggles from open-hearted to incandescent with total believability
The storytelling is enthralling but not flawless. It’s not entirely clear why Mahnaz’s sister would fall for the slimy imprecations of a man who has just ditched her own sibling, especially when their formidable, matter-of-fact mother is enraged by the idea. And an overheated final stretch, in which Mahnaz goes full black widow, overheats a film that works best when it’s simmering slowly. The question of her own responsibility in what transpired is glossed over.
But Woman and Child, the third part in Roustayi’s trilogy about Iranian women (2016’s Life and a Day, 2022’s Leila’s Brothers), manages to be both incredibly tense and deeply stirring in its depiction of a woman coping with unimaginable pain.
And in the outstanding Izadyar, who toggles from open-hearted to incandescent with total believability, he’s found the perfect collaborator to bring down the curtain on his feminist triptych.
Woman and Child premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.