180° Rule (Khate-e Farzi)

With just a few short films, co-written or co-directed with her frequent collaborator, Ali Asgari, which won numerous awards at international film festivals, Farnoosh Samadi had established herself as one of the leading new wave of young women filmmakers in the Iranian cinema. The cinematic achievements of these two young filmmakers did not go unnoticed by the US Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and both were invited to join the Academy. 180° Rule (Khate-e Farzi), which Samadi has both written and directed, and premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, marks her feature film debut. Though the theme of the movie, woman’s role in the patriarchal Iranian society, has been covered many times by various Iranian filmmakers, Samadi brings her own individual feminist approach to the subject.

Sara (Sahar Dolatshahi) and Hamed (Pejman Jamshidi) are a middle class couple, living with their five year old daughter, Raha. Hamed is an engineer and Sara is a school teacher. Sara’s niece is getting married in one of the seaside towns in northern Iran and she has been badgering Hamed to ask for a short leave, so that they can attend the wedding. Meanwhile, Sara encounters an incident at the school. A young female student has taken sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt. When questioned by Sara, she confides to her that she has become pregnant by her boyfriend, a café owner, who has asked her to have an abortion. She is terrified of her parents, specially her father finding out about this and pleads with Sara to keep this as a secret.

Back at home, Hamed, to Sara’s consternation, informs her that he has an important work mission in south of Iran and cannot attend the wedding. Furthermore, he instructs, rather than ask, Sara that since Raha has a slight fever, Sara should also skip the wedding and stay in Tehran, looking after Raha.  Hamed is totally inflexible on this point as he leaves for his mission.

During Hamed’s absence, Sara makes a couple of decisions which will have profound impact on her life and those around her. First of all, the mother of the pregnant girl informs Sara that her daughter has gone missing and asks her if she has any information which may throw light on her daughter’s disappearance. Sticking to her pledge to the missing girl, Sara pleads ignorance. She also decides to attend the wedding with Raha, without informing Hamed.

Samadi uses the visual motif of white and black to indicate happiness and doom respectively. Everyone in the wedding has been required to wear white, even a local woman who shows the way to Sara. White motif also features in the opening shot of the movie, where milk in a pot boils over. And it is a black bird, which dies after hitting the glass window of Sara’s chalet, that forebodes darker times to come.

Raha has been chosen to sing at the wedding, which takes place outdoors where the cold season has arrived. The song she sings, though upbeat and pop in form, contains the line, “my frightened love was in my arms, dispirited and lifeless from the cold”, which further points to darkness to follow the light, black to follow white.

Whatever happens to both Sara and her female pregnant student has been initiated by decisions which were enforced on them by men. And the men have been empowered by both the law and society’s traditions. Even Sara’s father sides with Hamed in the ensuing arguments.

Samadi, in her feature film debut, 180° Rule, shows admirable mastery of camera and has elicited first rate performances from her cast. Pejman Jamshidi, an ex-footballer and a popular comic actor, has adjusted well to a serious role; the veteran actors Hassan Pourshirazi and Azita Hajian are, as expected, superb as Sara’s father and mother. Sadaf Asgari, a Samadi-Asgari regular who I expect to be elevated to stardom after her magnificent turn in Massoud Bakhshi’s Yalda (2020), is very good as the young bride. But it is Sahar Dolatshahi who carries the movie with her sublime portrayal of an anguished mother, wife and teacher. She has shown superb judgment in selecting her roles and been outstanding in films such as Behnam Behzadi’s Inversion (2016) and Alireza Motamedi’s Reza (2019). In many of the scenes in 180° Rule she has to convey her inner turbulent feelings without uttering a word, and she manages this superbly.

180° Rule marks Farnoosh Samadi as one of the emerging talented female directors in world cinema to follow closely. I only have a few minor quibbles with her script. It does have a couple of plot holes, which are not damaging but could have been avoided. I also would have liked Hamed’s character to be more developed and display a fuller range of emotions, though still inflexible in his decisions. And I would have liked a more original and unexpected ending. These are however minor criticisms which do not detract from her commendable achievement in writing and directing.