The Day I Became a Woman (U)

The antidote to Christmas bloat

Recently, a tradition seems to have started of releasing Iranian films immediately after Christmas: it happened with Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon and Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple – now The Day I Became a Woman follows suit. There's some logic in this, since all of these could just pass as that seasonal staple – children's cinema – albeit of a rather austere sort. Like the first two films, a third of Marziyeh Meshkini's debut feature has a child protagonist. Part of the logic might also be that after Christmas, films as sparse and bracing as these refresh the system nicely; just as some restaurants serve a brisk sorbet after a rich meal, so Meshkini's three-parter may be just the thing to cleanse your palate after the bloat induced by Tolkien and Harry Potter.

Iranian films tend to be stark, but The Day I Became a Woman mixes its stripped-down aesthetic with an odd larkiness. It's a comparatively minor film, with none of the weight and fury of Panahi's recent The Circle or Mohsen Makhmalbaf's surreal Afghanistan report Kandahar, but it is powerfully simple, its images communicating with sometimes dazzling economy. Like The Circle, this is a film about women in Iran, this time with a woman directing. But Marziyeh's film is only ostensibly realist; it feels more like a set of concise fables. In the first part, a nine-year-old girl negotiates one more hour of childhood before she officially becomes a woman and has to don the chador. In the second, a participant in a women's bicycle race is pursued by her angry husband. In the third and nuttiest story, an old woman buys a household's worth of furnishings and proudly sets them up on the beach, presumably running her fridge and cooker directly off Persian Gulf wave power.

There's an extraordinary single-mindedness to these ideas, a sense of rich scenarios being improvised out of the barest materials. The effect is close to Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards, in which the eponymous slates became shields, beds, screens, anything. In fact, Marziyeh Meshkini is stepmother to Samira, and married to Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and was assistant director on Blackboards; what's more, Mohsen co-wrote both Blackboards and The Day I Became a Woman. Like Samira, Meshkini studied at the Makhmalbaf Film School, a family academy that offers training in what may be the world's only dynastic film style.

Visibly working in that style, Meshkini doesn't yet seem to have quite the personal touch that her stepdaughter established so quickly, but even so, has made a confident, clear-sighted debut. Her first story looks at first as if it will have the same polemical thrust as The Circle: little Hava's grandmother drives a playmate away with the line, "She's not a child any more, she's nine today." After that, however, Meshkini is as interested in playing with the moment as her heroine is. Hava measures out her hour of childhood with a makeshift sundial, feeds a friend licks of lollipop through a window, then helps two boys build a boat from petrol cans, contributing her brand-new chador as a sail. There's a matter-of-factness about the photography that seems drab until you realise how strongly your attention clings to the simplest things: a flicker of a scarf, the peeling yellow of the window bars.

The second vignette is the most audacious, taking place entirely in the course of a bicycle race. A woman cyclist gets divorced on two wheels: that's the gist of what could have been a paper-thin sketch, but Meshkini pushes the conceit as far as it will go, so that her heroine's cycling almost becomes a metaphor for Meshkini's determination to make this single image run and run. First the husband comes galloping up, then he brings an angry mullah for reinforcement ("What you are riding is not a bicycle, it's the devil's mount"), then a group of bare-chested greybeards join in, all still galloping along like disgruntled centaurs. And still our heroine keeps pedalling, pedalling.

In the third story, a tender bit of socioeconomic farce, an old woman gathers an entourage of black children as porters for a whole IKEA showroom's worth of wares. The film is set on Kish in the Persian Gulf, an island which appears to have a strong African population, and somehow Meshkini's film seems to have picked up the absurdist flavour of certain African film-makers, notably the late Senegalese eccentric Djibril Diop Mambety. More than anything else, Meshkini's third story reminded me of the very African-flavoured short that her husband made on Kish, and on which she was assistant director. It was about a man walking across a desert with a door on his back; he has to stand it upright in order to receive post.

A film like this is so single-minded that you could easily come out of the cinema shrugging and wondering if you've had your money's worth; then, chances are, you'll find its images haunting you afterwards. It also serves as a powerful refutation of the Western cult of the over-developed script: just one idea, pushed as far as it needs to go, then Meshkini moves on to the next. Forget character development and story arc – the only arc you need concern yourself with here is that of a few hundred chador-wearing women on bicycles stretching into the dusty distance.

j.romney@independent.co.uk