Bal­lad of a White Cow – first-look review

In 2020, Moham­mad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil became the third Iran­ian film in the past decade to win Berlin’s top prize, fol­low­ing Jafar Panahi’s Taxi Tehran and Asghar Farhadi’s A Sep­a­ra­tion. A crit­i­cal dra­ma about state-sanc­tioned mur­der, Rasoulof was hand­ed a one-year prison sen­tence for what the Iran­ian author­i­ties dubbed as “ pro­pa­gan­da against the system”.

One year lat­er, it’s sur­pris­ing to find anoth­er film about Iran’s inhu­mane jus­tice sys­tem at the fes­ti­val. How­ev­er, Bal­lad of a White Cow isn’t rid­ing the coat­tails of Rasoulof’s suc­cess, and announces direct­ing duo Behtash Sanaee­ha and Maryam Moghad­dam as excit­ing new voic­es in Iran­ian cinema.

The film focus­es on Mina (Moghad­dam), a sin­gle moth­er strug­gling to raise her deaf daugh­ter. ​“Of course noth­ing can replace your hus­band… but it was, after all, God’s will.” These half-heart­ed words of con­do­lence stun Mina. A year after her hus­band was exe­cut­ed by the state, she has just learnt that he was wrong­ful­ly accused. She will be com­pen­sat­ed with ​“the full price for an adult male”, but behind her tears a febrile anger begins to emerge, and she sets out to get a pub­lic apol­o­gy from the judge who sen­tenced her husband.

Moghad­dam is per­haps best known for her sup­port­ing role in Panahi’s Closed Cur­tain, but she takes cen­tre stage here, deliv­er­ing a qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing per­for­mance. The injus­tice that burns at the heart of the film is nei­ther stark nor orna­men­tal. It is mere­ly the wall­pa­per that fur­nish­es Mina’s life, and through­out the film she car­ries her­self with a pas­sive mix of res­ig­na­tion and rage, as if already used to the flavour of her suffering.

In less­er hands this sub­tle approach might strip the film of its raw and ele­men­tal pow­er, but Moghad­dam instills a sense of the dan­ger and pow­er­less­ness that comes from occu­py­ing a female body in a staunch­ly patri­ar­chal society.

Whether it’s nav­i­gat­ing the bureau­crat­ic process of apply­ing for wel­fare, or avoid­ing her father-in-law who insists she moves in with him and ​“raise her daugh­ter with dig­ni­ty” Sanaee­ha and Moghad­dam fol­low each unex­pect­ed turn of Mina’s jour­ney with effort­less grace. Then one day a stranger named Reza (Alireza Sani Far) knocks at her door. He claims he’s there to repay a debt he owes her late hus­band, but as their rela­tion­ship devel­ops it becomes clear that there’s some­thing much dark­er that con­nects the two of them.

Built on the foun­da­tions of a close­ly guard­ed secret, Bal­lad of a White Cow shares more than a pass­ing resem­blance to Farhadi’s aus­tere, eth­i­cal dra­mas. Yet Sanaee­ha and Moghad­dam also have a pen­chant for alle­go­ry and a keen eye for sym­bol­ism, with Mina’s inevitable decline bright­ened by the occa­sion­al glim­mer of resis­tance. From her cin­e­ma-lov­ing daugh­ter Bita, named after Hajir Darioush’s 1972 film, to the way Mina wields her lip­stick like a con­cealed weapon, there’s a sense that change is still some­thing worth fight­ing for.

A well-plot­ted and tight­ly struc­tured dra­ma about guilt and respon­si­bil­i­ty, Bal­lad of A White Cow expos­es how Iran’s ​‘eye for an eye’ approach to jus­tice has left soci­ety blink­ered to the suf­fer­ing of women.