Another great (early) film from Iranian director Fahradi

There's no doubt that Asghar Fahradi, the Irania filmmaker (writer and director) who made headlines by refusing to travel to the U.S. for the Academy Awards, is also making his mark as one of the finest fimmakers of our time. His films are as thoughtful and dynamic as great stage dramas - Ibsen or Pinter come to mind, with tremendous family antagonisms against a background of life in a complex urban community, stress in both family and society interacting - and we can see an early phase of his career, one of the films that I think established him internationally, in Fireworks Wednesday, from 2006 . The movie follows the Aristotelian principles of unity (time, place, action), all taking place in one day, in Teheran (various locations, but mostly in a middle-class apartment high rise), and all concerning a young woman, a few days before her marriage, who goes to an employment bureau and is assigned to a day job as a cleaning woman in a unit in the high rise, and she finds herself in the midst of a domestic drama, involving infidelity, very harsh disputes between husband and wife, some bizarre and paranoid (yet maybe justified) behavior by the wife, and shifting sympathies throughout. Fahradi must be aware of the repressive regime in which he lives and works, obviously, but he subtly makes us aware as well of the conditions of repression that pervade the city and the culture - the long hooded black capes that the women must wear are ever-present - although shed immediately once indoors - but we're always aware of the possibility at any moment of a woman's being stopped, questioned, berated, or worse. The film editing is excellent - sometimes with a hand-held documentary feel to it (especially the interiors) and at other times beautiful staging and lighting on the street scenes, particularly the drive at night as the city celebrates the new year with fireworks and bonfires. We get the sense of contemporary Tehran as in some ways a vibrant, modern, urban environment and in other ways almost medieval. It's a difficult and sometimes challenging movie - as in lots of great art, we're put right into the midst of events, seeing things through eyes of the bewildered young woman, and the relationships among the characters are not entirely clear at first, but the movie comes together and builds in power and impact as it moves inexorably toward a difficult conclusion (not a resolution).