Good Bye (2011)

(Bé Omid É)

Directed by: Mohammad Rasoulof

“When you feel like a foreigner in your own country, it’s better to be a foreigner in a foreign country” says Noora (Leila Zare), a human rights lawyer whose licence to practice has been suspended, while her husband (a newspaper publisher whose newspaper has been shut down) is on the run from the police.  She wants to leave Iran, and she’s been advised to get pregnant and give birth while abroad.  But her husband is reluctant to leave, and now she fears her baby may be born with Down’s syndrome.

Zare gives a luminous performance as Noora, her skin seeming to drain of not just colour but life itself as she meets one obstacle after another.  Her periods of silence (and there are many of these) are filled with small, telling details.   Rasouluf, working with a crew who gave their time free, paints in chiaroscuro and creates a sense of the agonising slowness of her wait for her fate.  At every turn she encounters the lack of agency that Iranian women have in their country: the constant need to show that they have their husband’s permission.

An immensely assured film, it’s interesting to compare this with the excellent A Separation, also showing at TIFF, which covers depicts similar issues in a quite different way. Both are eminently worth seeing.