ROMANTIC DRAMA; 1hr 37min (Persian with subtitles)
STARRING: Lily Farhadpour, Esmail Mehrabi
Picture-perfect: Farhadpour and Mehrabi
After waking at noon, Iranian widow Mahin (Farhadpour, the heartbeat of every scene) can’t be bothered to take off her sleeping mask while drinking her breakfast tea, pushing it back into her hair and sipping in glum silence with a ciggie. This is not someone inclined to carpe her diem. At 70, Mahin looks resignedly old. Her girlfriends are also feeling the pinch of years: at a get-together chez Mahin, one brings along footage of her colonoscopy. The talk otherwise is of men, much of it of the disparaging, “What joy did our dead husbands ever bring us?” variety.
Hitting your third act in Tehran is plainly the pits: if your creaky knees don’t get you, the morality police most likely will. After 30 years of widowhood and with her grown children living overseas, Mahin is justifiably downcast. Yet in her slow and enclosed way, she refuses to succumb to invisibility. When she spots taxi driver Faramarz (Mehrabi) at a pensioners’ restaurant and learns that he, too, is single, something tectonic shifts within her and in a stunning act of boldness, she invites him home.
Faramarz, who could hardly be more resigned to his own dispiriting issues, is about to be in for the night of his life. Closet fox Mahin slips into something silky and pours them wine, which they drink in her pretty garden while the cabbie proceeds to pinch himself. Hidden under Mahin’s dowdy hijab is a renegade soul who loves to dance and cooks like the dream Faramarz has to feel he’s living.
Her pièce de resistance is an orange blossom cake, a creamy dessert that ushers in another unheralded awakening. Film-makers Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha keep their culmination low-key, laying out Mahin’s subversive tilt at life with a lack of fanfare that speaks condemning volumes. In a culture where women are all but erased, she and her sisters are epically alone.
