May Lady (Rakhshan Bani Etemad, 1998)

Although Etemad's Nargess (1992) is the film which many consider the film to which comparisons are to be made to truly judge her work, I have never seen Nargess. Thus, I guess I am truly capable of judging her work in the accepted sense. But having seen Under the Skin of the City (2001) and her pitch-perfect Gilaneh (2005), I have to say that May Lady is somewhat of a digression. Filmed like an Iranian love poem with its constant reliance on literal rich metaphors, May Lady follows the life of a middle class woman, part mother to her son, part artist, and part lover to an unknown and unseen man of whom her son disapproves, both because she is divorced and because she is tangled in somewhat of an Oedipal struggle with him. The film is driven by the mother's musings, questioning her relationship with her kind but rebellious child, to her unseen lover who we only know from the letters he writes, and to the culture that forces her to choose between roles. All of this, while she makes a film about the "exemplary" Iranian mother. For the most part, Etemad is lost, never settling into a rhythm that really drives the conflicts of having to chose one's identity. It sounds ironic, requiring certainty in form to depict uncertainty in theme, but to an extent the uncertainty in her filmmaking--the inability to make either her voice-over or camera take dominance, or to fully depict the conflicts that bind lover, son, and mother together--belies a certainty in the opposite of what she wants to say about the role of the woman in Iran. The conflicts remain unsaid because sadly, one has to admit that in this case, there may be none at all. Unlike the mothers of her documentary, her conflicts stem from this perceived "choice." She realizes that she has options, and must choose one over another. Compared to the faces and lives of the women she captured on tape and stops, rewinds, and fast forwards on her editing deck at will, the question posed back to her dilemma is, "so what?" Unlike their brave choice to just be, the mother's brazen idea that there is any other option but to live disables Etemad from humanizing her, instead posing her as a "question" rather than a character. Gladly, Etemad's mother/filmmkaer does finish her film, through Gilaneh, which we are all very lucky to have.