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Dir. Cyrus Nowrasteh
Rating: 6.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
It is altogether fitting (and, one supposes, entirely intentional) that Jesus -- in the form of Jim Caviezel, who famously portrayed him in <i>The Passion of the Christ</i> -- appears in this brutally effective film from Cyrus Nowrasteh. The title pretty much sums up the plotline, but, as they say, the devil is in the details. The martyr in question is Soraya (Mozhan Marnò), an Iranian woman from a small village married to an utterly loathsome husband, Ali (David Negahban), who is in the process of dumping her for a 14-year-old he has met in the nearby city. Soraya is completely trapped by the harsh Iranian law dictated by the Ayatollah, which mandates, essentially, that "men are innocent and women are guilty." Beaten and dishonored repeatedly, Soraya has nowhere to turn but her aunt, the wise and fierce Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), of whom even the men in the village are slightly cowed. In an attempt to finally break free from his marriage for good, Ali cooks up a scheme with the local crooked Mullah (Ali Pourtash) and the mayor (David Diaan) to accuse Soraya of adultery, thereby sentencing her to death while releasing him from any financial obligation to her or his daughters. The framing device concerns Zahra's telling of her story to a French journalist (Caviezel), who has just happened to drive through town en route to another assignment. The film follows along with the Christ parallels perhaps a bit too heavy handedly -- before her execution, Soraya is dragged through town as if they were the stations of the cross -- and with Mel Gibson's infamous <i>Christ</i> in its focus of the spilling of her purely innocent blood and sorrow on the screen, but there's no denying the power and outrage the film generates. Director Nowrasteh paints a didactic black and white portrait of evil as it visits upon this town on this day -- Ali, for one, does everything but twirl his moustache at the deceit he's created -- which makes for powerful propaganda but doesn't do much to address the reality of the violence and the culture that permits it. "It's a man's world!" Ali bellows at his two sons at the dinner table one night. It is near the end of the film, when you see him helpfully place rocks in the hands of his two boys so they can get to the business of murdering their mother that you fully understand what he means.
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