Afsane-ye-ah

boring, cliche, terrible acting, ...

If you want to see a feminist Iranian movie, there are much better movies to watch. try "The day I became a woman" (by Marzieh Meshkini), "The Hidden Half" (by Tahmineh Milani), "Under the city's skin" (by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad), .... Don't waste your time with this one. This is an early, unsuccessful film of Tahmineh Milani.

This film deals with the myth of a character "Ah" (or "Sigh" in English) who is summoned whenever someone "sighs from the bottom of the heart." He comes to alleviate the distress by granting one thing--the ability to change places with someone else.

The main character thus chooses a person who she thinks has a better--or at least an easier--life than she does. Each time, it turns out the person whom she thought had it easy, had unforeseen difficulties in her own life. You see the character start as a wealthy widow, then as her housekeeper with six children, than as the housekeeper's rural sister, then as a university student, then as a writer. Each has their own particular problems that make them unknowingly summon "Ah" with a heavy sigh.

The description on the film's box says that this is a "feminist" story--and in today's Iran it is likely to be so. However, it is quite a different variety of feminism than is known to most westerners.

The most striking this I took away from seeing the film is how odd it seems to have men dressed in clothing you'd see men in most countries wearing (shirts and slacks), and hijab (Islamic modest dress--head and full body covering) for women. It's like watching people from two different time periods. Weird.

My rating: 7