Three-part omnibus on the youth, maturity, and dotage of the Iranian woman, all parts scripted by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (director of Gabbeh, The Silence, et al.), and directed by his wife, Marzieh Meshkini, a graduate, together with their daughter Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple), of the private filmmaking school, since disbanded, known as Makhmalbaf Film House. The first of the three stories -- anecdotes, really -- chronicles the last hour of girlhood before the protagonist officially turns nine ("Hide your hair, don't sin"): the planted stick in the ground, whose shortening shadow measures the dwindling minutes of freedom till noon, is as oppressive an image as the grandfather clock in High Noon. The little heroine's grim persistence, or persistent grimness, is evidently something of a national trait and not the personal monopoly of Abbas Kiarostami; and the shallow space of this episode is replete with the familiar Kiarostamian textures of fabric, earth, plaster, weathered and painted wood. The second story turns startlingly horizontal, a breathless succession of tracking shots over a flat landscape, to keep up with a women's bicycle race and, riding parallel on horseback, the protesting family members of one of its grim and persistent participants ("What you are riding is not a bicycle! It's the devil's mount!"). As if this episode were not dreamlike enough, the third enters a self-conscious surrealist vein wherein an old lady lavishes her inheritance on a shopping spree for furniture and appliances, setting up house on an open beach. Each of the stories stretches out well past its point, and (notwithstanding the dynamism of the second one) soon settles into a state of stagnation. Though their clashing styles do not nearly cohere, they nevertheless reveal the apprentice filmmaker to have been a well-rounded student. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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