Inver­sion

A cou­ple stare out at a met­ro­pol­i­tan cityscape from the sec­ond floor of a derelict apart­ment block. ​“Our hazy Tehran,” one of them says wist­ful­ly, ​“this is the only city that I love.” Smog hangs thick in the air, bright head­lights glow­ing through clouds of grey smoke. Behnam Behzadi’s cap­ti­vat­ing fam­i­ly dra­ma, Inver­sion, por­trays not only the pol­lut­ed ​‘ther­mal inver­sion’ of a city but also the inver­sion of a life.

Offer­ing insight into the every­day real­i­ties of life in Iran’s cap­i­tal, the film chron­i­cles one woman’s strug­gle against the patri­ar­chal forces threat­en­ing to suf­fo­cate her. Like many recent Iran­ian releas­es, this is a sto­ry set in mid­dle-class Tehran, exam­in­ing the gen­er­a­tion gap and pulling astute social crit­i­cism from seem­ing­ly ordi­nary cir­cum­stances. What sets this film apart is its plucky hero­ine cou­pled with Behzadi’s invest­ment in cap­tur­ing the sub­tle strength of his female characters.

Niloo­far (Sahar Dolat­shahi) is strug­gling against the prej­u­dice entwined with being female, unmar­ried, and on the wrong side of 30. She lives with her elder­ly moth­er Mahin (Shirin Yaz­dan­bakhsh), for whom she pro­vides round-the-clock care. When Mahin is tak­en ill with res­pi­ra­to­ry issues caused by the smog and is ordered to leave the city, Niloo­far is faced with a dilem­ma. Should she accom­pa­ny her moth­er to the coun­try­side, dis­re­gard­ing her suc­cess­ful 10-year-old busi­ness and bur­geon­ing romance, or stay in Tehran and alien­ate her family?

Niloofar’s strug­gle is brought to life through the enchant­i­ng wide eyes of Saba (Setareh Hos­sei­ni), her young niece. Emblem­at­ic of a new gen­er­a­tion and a more pro­gres­sive atti­tude, Saba looks up to her aunt as an exam­ple of lib­er­a­tion, and is forced to watch as men, under the aus­pices of tra­di­tion, tram­ple all over her free­dom. In this bat­tle of wills, Ali Mosaf­fa offers up an incred­i­ble per­for­mance as the com­man­deer­ing elder broth­er, Farhad. After he’s decid­ed to send Niloo­far away and has sold her busi­ness to pay off his own debts, she con­fronts him.

“I’m sup­posed to ask your per­mis­sion?” he asks. ​“My opin­ion at least,” she implores, her eyes heavy with tears. There is a long pause. ​“What opin­ion?” he bites back. In this moment, we’re faced with the stark real­i­ty of Niloofar’s predica­ment: no hus­band, no opin­ion. The illu­so­ry free­dom she’s spent her life cul­ti­vat­ing falls qui­et­ly to pieces around her, and it’s sub­dued traf­fic jams, missed phone calls and hos­pi­tal rooms that pro­vide the back­drop for her battle.

This is a sim­ple film, yet Behzadi’s dia­logue-heavy, char­ac­ter-dri­ven sto­ry­telling is nev­er less than com­pelling. It’s no acci­dent the film ends on an ambigu­ous note – the direc­tor leav­ing us with a gen­tle yet poignant reminder that Saba’s bat­tle is not yet won. Despite the fact that Iran­ian women are more lib­er­at­ed than they’ve ever been, Inver­sion shows they’ve still got a long way to go.