A young woman is seen in close-up, her face a sea of roiling emotion. With her shaved head and haunted eyes, she is reminiscent of nothing so much as the heroine of Carl Theodor Dreyer's legendary The Passion of Joan of Arc. Amangol (Altinay Ghelich Taghani) is pressed by her impoverished family to dress like a man in order to work as a weaver. She finds a life marked by petty abuse and back-breaking work. The only diversion is one of her co-workers, engaged to an older man, who has fallen for her in her male disguise, and begs Amangol to marry her. Daughters of the Sun is no Joan, but it does have moments of poignancy interleaved with its drab plot.
The cross-dressing trope has been a recurrent one in Iranian film, emphasizing the plight of women in Iran through subtle comparison. For the women of the film, existence is a life sentence, doomed to loveless marriages, endless hard work and a nagging sense of inferiority. Daughters of the Sun strangely places Amangol's conversion to the masculine Aman as an unchallenged fact; no one at the weavers', including her prospective girlfriend, seems to wonder whether the gentleman with the shaved head and soft features might be anything other than what he claims to be.
Director Maryam Shahriar downplays the plot, choosing to focus instead on the gorgeous, golden light of the Iranian countryside and the vivid colors of the rugs being made. It is only in the film's last third that its catastrophic dimensions emerge into full bloom. Aman's world rapidly falls apart, and she lashes out in an act of desperation. Her existence is contrasted with a townsman's wild horse, who refuses to be broken into an income-producing racer. Aman dreams of the horse running free across a wide-open plain—a symbol of the freedom she has been barred from possessing. Daughters of the Sun ends on a hazy long shot, a landscape with figure.
Borrowing from Abbas Kiarostami's playbook of ambiguous endings, Daughters reaches its close without fully revealing its hand. Is it a tragedy or a parable of feminist uprising? Like Kiarostami, Daughters of the Sun is cryptic enough to allow a certain freedom of interpretation to its viewers. Ultimately, as with much of the best Iranian filmmaking, what you think the film is about says as much about you as it does about the film.
Pioneer Theater, 155 E. 3rd St. (Ave. A), 212-254-3300, Thurs.-Sun., 7; Mon.-Weds., 5, $9.
Saul Austerlitz
