Endeavoring to drive a wedge even further between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, to foster misunderstanding and foment hostility, filmmaker Cyrus Nowrasteh tells the inflammatory “true story” of the execution of an Iranian wife falsely accused of adultery by a cheating husband who doesn’t want to pay for a divorce. Recommended viewing, maybe, for anyone who, in order to be convinced of the barbarity of the practice, needs to see the full cold-blooded preparations of burying the woman up to her hips with arms pinioned at her sides, needs as well to see every blood-drawing stone thrown — some of them in slow-motion, the first few of them thrown preferentially by father, husband, and sons — and needs in addition for the victim to be completely innocent of the charge: an Islamic Ox-Bow Incident. (What? It would be less distasteful if she’d been guilty?) Anyone else will likely be convinced only of the proportionate barbarity, to whatever smaller degree, of the director, with his hammering closeups, his melodramatized villains (the husband’s eyes narrowing to slits, the mullah’s pupils darting side to side), and a moral subtlety that extends no farther than his grudging admission that one or two men in the village might personally be less than eager to pitch in and throw a stone. Shohreh Aghdashloo, Mozhan Marno, Navid Negahban, Ali Pourtash, James Caviezel. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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