The Day I Became A Woman

Star Review

An Iranian portmanteau describing the trajectory of three women at various points in their lives.

The first film introduces us to a nine year old girl whose elders decide it’s time for her to become a woman, which means covering her up with a long black scarf. Naturally, the girl doesn’t take kindly to this, pleads for one more hour of childhood, and heads off - armed only with a stick to use as a makeshift sundial - to buy ice cream for her and her best friend. Its premise is that the day a young girl becomes a woman is the day she disappears from the world, and it ends with the sweetest scene seen in many a long while, as the girl and her friend share one last lollipop together before her mother comes to take her away.

The second film rides alongside a woman whose attempts to win a cycle race are interrupted by her nay-saying husband, tribesmen and brothers. It’s halfway through this middle section one starts to appreciate director Marziyeh Meshkini’s ability to extract a lot of meaning from what might at first appear simple imagery. The coastal path along which the race is being run grants the female cyclist a certain freedom, but after the husband and his cohorts have called for a divorce, there’s plenty of bad road up ahead.

The final part joins an elderly eccentric, with strings on her fingers and only a rooster waiting for her back home, as she goes on one final spending spree. Each section illustrates a different stage in an Iranian woman’s relationship with the opposite sex: snatched away from them by the overbearing parents of the first part, she’s then aggressively pursued by men who want to make her subservient throughout part two before finally getting them to run around after own. But in the third part - by which time even the boys of the film are trying on eyeliner and lipstick - femininity itself takes to the sea, watched by the nine year old girl of the film’s first part: and for better or worse, all of this, it can be assumed, is coming her way.

Mike McCahill on 5th June 2002

View all 124 of Mike McCahill’s reviews

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Film Description

A visually arresting film set around three stages in a woman's life. Each tale is based somewhere between realism and allegory and all are pointed up with images that could be surreal, could just be everyday. The stories are simple: A nine-year old girl is told she is now a woman and can no longer play with boys, a woman keeps riding in a bike race despite the protestations of her husband on his horse and an old woman buys all the goods she has never had in her life in a shopping trip in an airport mall. The remarkable images that these stories give us stay in the mind for a very long time.

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DVD Extras

• Production notes, filmographies.

Film Details

Cast

Fatemeh Cherag Akhar, Shabnam Toloui, Azizeh Sedighi

Technical Details