Apu’s World

Occasionally, one comes across a movie that is both an exceptionally clear mirror to the society it is about and an extremely fine work of art. The Circle, only the second Iranian movie I’ve seen, I believe falls into this category. (This first one was Children of Heaven). 

The Circle, (’Dayereh’ in the original Farsi) doesn’t really have a plot, unlike most films. Rather, it is a peek into the lives of a few Iranian women, and this is the interesting bit - we enter their stories neither at the ‘beginning’, nor at the ‘end’, but at some unspecified point in the arc of their lives. What is common to all of them is the challenges that they face, mostly as a result of being women in the highly repressive society that is Iran. 

Three women have been released (or escaped) from prison, it wasn’t clear to me which. One of them gets re-arrested for some reason while the other two struggle to collect some money to send the younger one of them home. She manages to get a bus ticket with great difficulty, since a young woman without a student card or a guardian isn’t really allowed to travel alone. After much persuasion, she gets the ticket, but abandons the journey when she realises that police are around and fears detection. We don’t know what becomes of her ultimately. 

Another woman who has also been released from prison is kicked out by her family and goes searching for other friends she had made in the prison. Soon, we realise that she is pregnant and urgently needs an abortion. She goes to meet an old friend, who is now a nurse and has successfully concealed her time spent in prison from everyone, including her husband. Her hopes of getting some help from this friend are soon dashed. Society will neither let her have a child as a single mother, nor let her abort it. 

We see her walking around despondently when one of the most chilling scenes of the movie occurs - a poor, single mother trying to abandon her child so that someone else would take her in for a better life. Finally, the movie comes back full circle to one of the first stories, and this woman is now in prison. In none of the cases do we see a ‘happy ending’ or even an unhappy one. Throughout the movie, I kept having this ominous feeling that something terrible was about to happen and though there is no such ‘event’, in a sense, all the stories are quite terrible. Yet, the movie didn’t feel like an immersion in misery. 

The camaraderie among the women, the palpable affection, the occasional laughter, even optimism among some of them, made it seem lighter than the dark story that it really was. For, when one thinks that there really are such places in the world for women; the reality is depressing. 

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