Jacob Chrispim

The May Lady (1999), directed by Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, explores the navigation of womanhood and motherhood in late 90s Iran through the character of Forough Kia in a cinematically reflective manner. Formally and narratively, the film is constructed with the intention of portraying the intersections between being a woman in Iran and the process of filmmaking. Bani-Etemad visually represents the veil in connection to inward and outward expression, integrates her own views on cinema in the film, and explores the conflicts between feminine desire and the societal expectations of motherhood. Put in conversation with each other, these aspects of the film reveal that Bani-Etemad uses meta-commentary in her depiction of Forough as a filmmaker and a woman. Through the lens of her craft, she navigates how Iranian women have been and continue to be portrayed in Iranian cinema in a manner that defies and criticizes the idea that there is one way to be a woman that is superior to any other. At its core, the film is interested in the multiplicities of existing as a woman. Forough is used to push against narratives of confinement in regards to women in Iranian films, and to honestly explore the reality of complicated issues of femininity. 

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One way that Bani-Etemad approaches the concept of duality is by playing with space on the screen in order to display Forough’s private and vulnerable moments. For instance, her relationship with Rahbar, a doctor that is her lover after her divorce, is an important part of her life, but she is unable to allow herself to express her feelings about it because of her son’s jealousy and the societal stigma against divorced women entering new relationships. The film holds back on visibly presenting the passions of this (Forough and Rahbar never shown together onscreen), both because it must, and because cinema has other means of representing a female character’s private life. Bani-Etemad achieves this by having the camera focus on the environment around Forough while she reads the letters from Rahbar. With slow shots that move through her home, linger on the letters on her desk, and sound that mixes his voice with hers, we gain access to her private thoughts, pieced together by the film’s form and structure. The strategies Bani-Etemad uses to work around restrictions while depicting female desire call attention to the film’s cinematic structures and conventions for the purpose of societal commentary. One of these strategies is the use of space, which is especially prevalent in the ways the film approaches the topic of veiling. 

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As viewers, we understand that in the space of her own home, Forough would take her veil off, but Bani-Etemad makes us aware that this is not something we will actually see on the screen. Here, while restriction does not allow unveiling, the formal choices in the film are able to represent Forough’s private side regardless. Hamid Naficy provides insight into a particular scene. In the fourth volume of A Social History of Iranian Cinema, he discusses a scene in which Forough reaches for her headscarf before the shot pans to her, blocked from view behind a door. He praises this tactic for its realism, stating that “the result is the intensified spectator identification with the diegetic female characters and the heightened naturalism of the movie,” and says that Bani-Etemad both “naturalizes” and “effaces” the veil in a cinematic context (160). This analysis addresses the duality and contradiction that is inherent in the film and takes note of how the viewer is led to both notice the scarf and its meaning and presence in this woman’s life and to reflect on the larger cinematic context of the veil in Iranian films. There is an intensely personal aspect to implying its removal, which shows the viewer how Forough navigates spaces of the home and privacy, especially in contrast to her public life as a filmmaker, or how she navigates motherhood. She is multiple within one, a single character who cinematically brings together the experiences of many women, as the film does itself. We understand her in the context of her own experiences, but also in a way that leads into a discussion about women in Iranian film throughout cinematic history. 

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Forough conducts interviews with different women as a part of her motherhood project, in which she is meant to find “the best mother” by comparing the various stories of motherhood she encounters. These interviews are important for her narrative journey. They help her take the final steps to accept and embody her full self in her home and in public, as a woman and a mother, and they also function as a way for Bani-Etemad to explore her own goals and intentions as a female filmmaker. Forough’s process of discussing these women’s perspectives with them, and later combing through what she’s encountered while she edits, are mirrored by what Bani-Etemad herself is doing by inserting these scenes. By including these interviews, Bani-Etemad is considering how her work portrays the various realities for Iranian women that she represents. Representative of the realism Naficy has praised the film for, these interviews take on an archival documentary quality. This effect is achieved because Forough’s project becomes a portion of the film, and the footage from her camera, the edits she has made, and the questions she asks form a realistic documentary. The interviews are the product of the character’s filmmaking, existing under a double layer of narrative that grounds what these characters say in reality. As the women discuss their struggles caring for their children, avoiding the judgment that comes with remarriage, mourning children who have died, and centering their roles as mothers at the forefront of their lives, the film cuts between Forough holding her camera and Forough watching this footage from the screens of her editing room. In the midst of this, she reflects on her own mothering, wondering where she stands in this spectrum and what she must prioritize raising her own son as he approaches manhood. The film has us bear witness to the suffering of sacrifice, and represents the realities of women that might suit “ideal” feminine cinematic archetypes, figures on the screen that make efforts to “correctly” be mothers and women in society. 

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What we ultimately understand, however, is that the concept of an “ideal mother” provides no basis for understanding human existence. What Forough becomes interested in, and by extension what Bani-Etemad explores, is how all these vastly different experiences of womanhood are much more complex than judgment would allow, yet judgment is what they contend with. This cinematic project has allowed them to express their pain and make the effects of their environments on their lives visible and undeniable. The process of filmmaking here is also a process of a woman recognizing and platforming the experiences of other women, while questioning and exploring her own. This period of Iranian filmmaking saw various female directors explore similar themes in their works, such as Tahmineh Milān with Two Women (1999), which examines two women and their life experiences and struggles with a patriarchal society at the start of the Islamic Republic, and Marzieh Meshkini with The Day I Became a Woman (2000), which depicts different stages of Iranian women’s lives. This is a period that Bani-Etemad consciously functions within, and she champions the possibilities of empowerment it contains. 

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This film is also about the boundaries of censorship. Bani-Etemad has a particular interest and appreciation for the movement produced by the circumstances surrounding filmmaking with restrictions and challenges. In an interview with Shiva Rahbaran, after Bani-Etemad discusses Iran’s cinematic history and the effects external societal and political shifts have had on filmmakers and their work, she states: “Through this challenge, Iranian cinema learned how to deal with the issues of our reality and society in both poetic and realistic language. What I mean is that Iranian cinema developed the language of a kind of poetic realism, through which the filmmaker could show social reality with sharp precision” (128). She clarifies that she is not praising the censorship, and views it as a negative, but uplifting the efforts of Iranian filmmakers in creating a new kind of cinema that avoids dishonesty despite the constraints they face pushing them to make dishonest films. We see this integrated into the themes of The May Lady, as it explores social realities, exemplified by the interview scenes and the depictions of Forough’s life, while also using the poetic aspects of cinema to be honest about love and desire. 

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In addition to looking at the ways that the film is honest about social reality for women, it is important to consider what it has to say about inner reality, especially in regards to its controversial statements about love and sexuality. The May Lady approaches particularly powerful topics in its conception of Forough’s sexuality. This aspect of the film, especially in consideration to its ending, is critical of the denial of female expression that government restrictions for filmmaking and societal judgments work toward. Throughout the film, her son’s jealousy and resentment of her for her relationship with the doctor, Rahbar, as well as his inability to accept that she has an existence outside of being his mother, and will eventually not be able to take on the same role in his life, restrict how she expresses herself. She must fear his reaction when she goes out to meet her lover. He becomes angry when this relationship is mentioned, and at one point storms out of the house when Forough receives a call from Rahbar, speeds past guards in her car, gets into a fight with one and is arrested until she pleads for his release. She is pressured to deny her own desires out of a sense of obligation. She explores this in conversation with an old friend that accompanies her on a walk, where she expresses her frustration, and in voiceovers as she drives and thinks about what she wants in her own life and for her son. Shahla Haeri, in “Sacred Canopy: Love and Sex under the Veil,” examines how Bani-Etemad approaches the topic of intimacy and erotic desire in the film. Considering Forough’s conflicts between trying to both please and care for her son and her love for the doctor, Haeri notes the effect of voiceovers in portraying the latter. She states that it “conveys the impression of intimacy and closeness, allowing the lovers to address each other in the most intimate and loving terms, which they probably would not have been able to do had they been actually present together in the same space” (124). By the film’s end, the ideas of formal meta-commentary, cinematic space as a window into the restricted, and the realities of women’s lives have coalesced. Forough sits her son down and expresses the part of herself she has been keeping away from him for his own sake. The doctor’s physical absence here is important, because in this way the film avoids suggesting that Forough is shifting her attention to the wants of a different man. Rather, she expresses her intimacy with Rahbar on her own terms, insisting that she can be both mother and lover, public and private, a woman in more ways than one. These things do not all have to be fully exposed or visualized, and she does not have to subject them to a judgemental gaze, but she can exist, feeling these things, without defining herself through absolutes. 

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In conclusion, The May Lady is a film about the very spirit of the Iranian filmmaking that led to its creation and will continue to inspire, through it and outside of it. Bani-Etemad, spectacularly aware of the power of her own cinematic consciousness and intent on portraying reality fully and honestly in her work, imbues the film with a statement about cinema’s connections to womanhood, through what is visible and invisible, and in a way that denies uncomplicated definition. Constructed with the grand scope of Iran’s film history and a myriad of female perspectives and experiences in mind, the film grounds itself in the life of one character and her understanding of her complete self. Her experiences defy a separation between motherhood and womanhood. They form a togetherness, with congruent contradictions, connected in a web rather than divided by a line. The film arrives at the understanding that there is no specific way to be a mother or to be a woman. There are ways of being, and paths of existence for all. They must be complex and difficult to be real and true.