Silence Between Two Thoughts (15)

Out of Iran: what the authorities don't want us to see

One of the snappier titles in Cannes this year - even if the film didn't live up to it - was the Korean feature Woman is the Future of Man, named after a line by French poet Louis Aragon. That could also be the motto of much recent Iranian cinema, which has pleaded compellingly for Islamic societies to renew themselves by listening to female voices. Foremost examples are Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, Jafar Panahi's The Circle and Abbas Kiarostami's in-car chamber drama Ten.

One of the snappier titles in Cannes this year - even if the film didn't live up to it - was the Korean feature Woman is the Future of Man, named after a line by French poet Louis Aragon. That could also be the motto of much recent Iranian cinema, which has pleaded compellingly for Islamic societies to renew themselves by listening to female voices. Foremost examples are Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, Jafar Panahi's The Circle and Abbas Kiarostami's in-car chamber drama Ten.

Now Babak Payami's Silence Between Two Thoughts argues that a society that yokes itself to patriarchal fundamentalism is doomed. So starkly does Payami make his case that it comes as no surprise that his film has fallen foul of the Iranian authorities and been confiscated. The version released this week is a print assembled from whatever film and video material was available.

Many recent films have been outspoken about the discontents of Iranian society, yet their makers have managed to distribute them widely abroad. Payami is certainly explicit in his attack on zealotry, which is no doubt what led to the film being singled out by the censors. But they surely can't have worried about the prospect of it being an international art-house hit; Payami's message is all the more direct because of the compellingly severe - and radically uncommercial - visual language in which he conveys it. (The Circle's director Jafar Panahi, incidentally, was one of Payami's editors.)

The film is set and shot in an arid region of Iran, close to the Afghanistan border, where a village community is ruled by an elderly religious leader, Haji. The villagers, headed by their prayer caller, the Muezzin, distrust him and resent his rule of iron. But Haji has his followers, among them a devout young soldier (Kamal Naraoui) who carries out his executions. We see the young man in the film's opening shot, his head wrapped in a scarf with only his eyes visible, looking intently at something that we don't see. We hear a trigger cocked, and only then see the soldier lift his gun to fire it: we hear the shot, then a body falling somewhere off-screen. The same happens again, but before he can fire a third shot, he gets the order to reprieve the third prisoner.

Payami continues to hold the shot, as a young boy brings the soldier tea and banters with him, unafraid; as they talk, a woman passes in the background, leading a donkey cart. On the back are two dead bodies. As the camera begins to sidle round, this extraordinary shot slowly unfolds the complex truth of a simple but horrifically brutal situation. Payami's long take is the most discreetly effective stroke of cinema language I've seen in a while, and in itself almost justifies seeing the film.

But the story's premise proves even grimmer than we've so far gathered. The reprieved prisoner is a young woman (Maryam Moghaddam), charged with a crime that's never revealed and that perhaps she herself has no idea about. Haji has decreed that, since she will go to heaven if she dies a virgin, the soldier must marry her: the implication is that he must deflower her and then execute her. He reacts with inarticulate confusion - "Where is this written?" he asks, desperate for things to be done by the book. His initial distress is dictated by his hunger for order; it's only gradually that his inaction opens a window for compassion.

Payami immerses us in a landscape so austere, and a code of cultural customs so austerely male, that it comes as a relief when a local doyenne leads the village women on a traditional pilgrimage, and the film briefly explodes in a riot of dance and drumming. Still, as the title suggests, silence is the dominant mode. Although she has only a handful of terse lines throughout, Maryam Moghaddam gives a performance that communicates all the more in not being remotely communicative.

Payami's camera pans round the dark interior of the soldier's hut, at last finding the prisoner crouched in the corner: at one point, we hear her gasping breath. But what we see of the woman's features reveals both suffering and intelligence, and it's some achievement for Moghaddam to emote so eloquently, given just a sliver of light by which to read her face.

Payami barely lets us see what happens at the end - through much of the culminating action we just get a close-up of the soldier's face, but we know that what he's witnessing is apocalyptic. This is unapologetically less-is-more cinema: we barely know who the soldier and the woman are, but we're fascinated in them not as characters but as functions, and this gives the narrative the hard resonance of myth.

For the most part, too, Payami is more intent on maintaining an implacable gaze than on allowing us conventional visual pleasures, even of the spare, dusty sort we're used to in Iranian film. In any case, the extreme roughness of the print makes the film difficult to watch - and yet adds a fascination that Payami can't have predicted. The murky textures intermittently start to quake and ripple, like a market-stall bootleg; blurry bars of light obscure the edges of the frame, or a timecode will pop up without warning. Yet all this fortuitously makes us feel we're seeing something we weren't meant to, a hot samizdat edition sneaked out under the wire. At times, too, the texture brings another meaning: the smudginess and faded colour seem to be recording events that took place ages ago, in some brutal era long before cinema (a not-uncommon illusion you might call the "ethnographic fallacy").

Yet the video texture inevitably reminds us that the film was made recently, and somewhere not so far away as all that. Payami's film is as contemporary, as urgent, as close to home, as cinema can get.

j.romney@independent.co.uk