Woman and Child – first-look review

It’s hard to imag­ine that you could go from lov­ing a per­son deeply to loathing their guts and want­i­ng them dead with­in a mat­ter of sec­onds. Yet that sor­ry notion sits at the core of the new film from Iran­ian writer/​director Saeed Rous­taee in which friends, fam­i­ly mem­bers and lovers sud­den­ly find their var­i­ous rela­tion­ship sta­tus­es flip-reversed as a result of a series of trag­ic and unpre­dictable events.

Though the film draws on the lives and expe­ri­ences of a wide ensem­ble of play­ers, though at the cen­tre of it all is Pari­naz Izadyar’s wid­owed nurse Mah­naz, bring­ing up her two kids with the help of sis­ter Mehri (Soha Niast) while also attempt­ing to bring back some famil­ial sta­bil­i­ty by court­ing the dash­ing and wit­ty para­medic Hamid (Pay­man Maadi).

One big curve­ball in her life is that her son, Ali­yar (Sinan Mohe­bi), is, to quote The Life of Bri­an, a very naughty boy, and when he’s not manip­u­lat­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers out of doing chores, he’s scam­per­ing across rooftops and involved in a school­boy gam­bling cir­cle. He’s exact­ly like Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, a charm­ing, mature-beyond-his-years scamp who always push­es things just a tad too far.

Mah­naz adores him even though her demands and protes­ta­tions nev­er pen­e­trate his psy­che, but she needs to ship him and lit­tle sis Neda (Arshi­da Dorostkar) off to their father-in-laws for a bit while she does a lit­tle bit of manip­u­lat­ing of her own; specif­i­cal­ly, mak­ing it seem as if she only has one child from her pre­vi­ous mar­riage when Hamid’s par­ents come to dis­cuss pos­si­ble wed­ding plans.

Yet this inno­cent scheme goes wrong on every con­ceiv­able lev­el, leav­ing rela­tion­ships in tat­ters and even bod­ies in the ground. Though Mah­naz sad­dles some of the blame for the fall­out, her guilt quick­ly trans­forms into rage and her life duly becomes ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing down all those she per­ceives to have wronged her, includ­ing her son’s school­mas­ter who she believes is the cause for his errat­ic behaviour.

Rous­taee weaves this com­plex fam­i­ly web with art­ful rigour and skill, and his film makes a sat­is­fy­ing tran­si­tion from a cool­ly-observed fam­i­ly por­trait to a knuck­le-gnaw­ing soap opera at around the half-way point. Indeed, there’s a point where it feels as if the sto­ry here may even be a lit­tle too event­ful, as by the time a char­ac­ter has been able to square their emo­tions away, anoth­er big twist is mak­ing itself felt on the horizon.

Where the film excels, how­ev­er, is in its refusal to paint Mah­naz as the lov­able hero­ine, even if she suf­fers the lion’s share of the indig­ni­ties. Niast’s impres­sive, expres­sive per­for­mance nev­er allows us to pity this set-upon matri­arch, even as she refus­es to give an inch to those who have sud­den­ly become the ene­mies that she must con­quer. The film is shot and edit­ed with styl­ish reserve, and even makes time for the odd visu­al flour­ish, most notably via a bird’s eye shot of the court­yard beneath the fam­i­ly apart­ment where so many key inter­ac­tions take place.

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