‘The Day’ Is Rich in Revelations

For several years Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of Iran’s leading filmmakers, gave up directing to teach his craft to eight students. His daughter Samira and his wife, Marzieh Meshkini, may well prove to be his prize students. In both instances, Makhmalbaf created the outlines for the films his daughter and his wife would make, but they are most definitely the films of their directors.

Meshkini had been an assistant on her daughter’s film “The Apple,” and now she has made her own highly accomplished and affecting work, “The Day I Became a Woman.” This beautiful and poignant film is composed of three superbly shot episodes, all of them set on the island of Kish, surrounded by a shimmering sea. There is an overwhelming sense of freedom and openness embodied in endless ocean vistas that provide an ironic backdrop to the proscribed lives of a young girl, a wife and an elderly woman that unfold in the foreground.

In the first episode, “Havva” (Eve), we meet a pretty little girl (Fatemeh Cheragh Akhtar) who lives a carefree existence on the beach, where she plays with a neighbor boy (Hassan Nabehan). But this day will be different, for it is Havva’s ninth birthday, which means she is now considered a woman and not only must don her first chador but also never again play with Hassan or any other boy.

But because it is only 11 a.m. and Havva was born around noon, she bargains with her mother and grandmother for one hour of play, not fully comprehending that she is approaching the end of her childhood--and the beginning of her inferior status as a woman in a strict Islamic nation.

There is such a sense of revelation in virtually every moment of this luminous film that it’s amazing to consider all that happens and all its implications, some of it ironically symbolic. “The Day I Became a Woman” is rich in the pleasures of discovery.

Episode 2, “Ahoo” (Gazelle), fills the screens with approximately 20 young women, all in black chadors, participating in a bicycle race along a narrow, seemingly endless asphalt path alongside the shoreline. Peddling furiously is Ahoo (Shabnam Toloui), who is not merely trying to win the race but also attempting to outrun her husband, riding a horse. As the race proceeds, one is constantly aware that should Ahoo actually manage to get free of her husband and his clan, she would be in dire straits, for there would be no real place for her in society at large.

With the concluding sequence, “Houra” (Black-Eyed Beauty), Meshkini ever so subtly moves from the poetic to the slightly surreal. A very old woman, Granny (Azizeh Seddighi), alights from a plane in Kish and gets in a cart pedaled by a diligent boy (Badr Irouni Nejad). She orders him to take her on a spending spree at a vast, nearby shopping mall that could just as easily be in any suburb in America.

First, it’s a refrigerator--”All my life I wanted to drink cold water,” she says--and then other major appliances, plus a king-sized bed and a living room suite soon follow. But what will she do with all these goods? How does she expect to get them home, where her beloved pet rooster awaits food and water?

Whether by inheritance or some other windfall, the old woman, a doughty, kindly peasant type, now at long last has somehow gained the freedom and the finances to spend apparently limitlessly on a lot of stuff she always craved but may well not be able to use.

This exquisite, epiphany-like sequence ties together all three episodes in a lovely, breathtaking reverie worthy of Fellini. It evokes the feeling that we have seen the life of one woman, emblematic of all Iranian women, unfold in its various stages, a life that on a spiritual level is ultimately transcendent, soaring above the proscriptions of gender within an Islamic society.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: adult themes and situations.

‘The Day I Became a Woman’

Fatemeh Cheragh Akhtar: Havva

Shabnam Toloui: Ahoo

Azizeh Seddighi: Old Woman

Badr Irouni Nejad: Young Boy

A Shooting Gallery release of a Makhmalbaf Film House production. Director Marzieh Meshkini. Writer Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Cinematographers Ebraheem Ghafouri (Episodes 2 & 3) and Mohammad Ahmadi (Episode 1). Editors Mohammad Ahmadi (Episode 1), Shahrzad Pouya (Episodes 2 & 3) and Mayssam Makhmalbaf (Episode 1). Music Mohammad Reza Darvishi. Set designer Akbar Meshkini. In Farsi, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.

Exclusively at the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax through Thursday, 7907 Beverly Blvd., (323) 653-3117.