06.02.2014
Iran Review: Outrage comes cheap
Tom Munday reviews: Negar Azarbayjani, 'Facing mirrors', 2011
Perhaps it is appropriate that Iran, that veritable De Niro of international diplomacy, should play host to a fabulously accomplished national cinema. Confusing metaphors aside, I absolutely mean this as a compliment. It is a generally accepted fact amongst film-snob circles that Iranian cinema consistently punches well above its weight; a living, breathing embodiment of that proud, ‘do more with less’ (less finance, less freedom) tradition of the type that so astounded Francis Ford Coppola when he visited Cuba. “We don’t have the advantage of their disadvantages,” he quipped in 1975 - a sentiment that could absolutely be applied to modern-day Iran.
In the face of one of the most censorial regimes on the planet, whose laws governing blasphemy and ‘permissible’ transgressions are Byzantine at the best of times, this is a cinema which not only survives, but actually thrives. For the western viewer Iranian cinema provides an oasis of calm and profundity between the explosion-heavy fantasies of America and the bloated pretension of Europe: real stories about deeply divisive issues and the realities of human struggle, often as experienced first-hand.
Facing mirrors is a film which should fit this description pretty snugly. It tells the story of Eddie/ Adineh (Shayesteh Irani), a female-to-male transsexual attempting to emigrate from beneath the watch of her conservative father and flee the forced marriage being imposed upon her. During her escape Eddie strikes an unlikely friendship with the timid and reserved cab driver, Rana (Qazal Shakeri), struggling to support her family while her husband is in jail. Eddie, it just so happens, has plenty of money, and she is quite willing to part with it if the strongly religious Rana can overcome her fundamental prejudices and whisk her away to the social acceptance of a foreign sanctuary.
Though the film is already a few years old, I must confess that I had not heard of Facing mirrors before watching it - something made all the more curious by its meeting of all those ‘cinematic oasis/arthouse-darling’-type criteria. Its core thrust, interrogating the position of transgendered people in Iranian society, is something for which you would expect to see the film rightly garlanded with all manner of accolades and international recognition; a bold and brave statement against the oppression of LGBT people under a government which is notoriously intolerant of any perceived ‘deviancy’. It is also probably worth mentioning that the film is good - very good actually - able to deftly interweave tragedy and poignancy with humour and humanity with relative ease; able to take an incredibly difficult subject and yet still drive home that shared sense of terrible injustice. Why then had I not heard of it?
Confession time: a large part of my initial experience of Facing mirrors was informed by my own ignorance. In the first instance the film is not quite as obscure as I have implied; it has won the odd international award and the very fact that I was able to watch it in London at all is testament to the fact that it has had some fairly substantial global exposure. Even so, it remains anecdotally true that few people I have spoken to (film buffs all, naturally) had heard of the film. Researching it online brought me to an insightful article by Shima Houshyar on the Ajam Media Collective Blog.1 Houshyar’s answer was simple: the reason that neither I nor anyone else I had spoken to had heard of Facing mirrors was simply because it did not fit into an easy imperialist-chauvinist narrative. The film she unfavourably compares it to is Circumstance, the “outrageously sexy” (so sayeth the poster) lesbian coming-of-age picture championed by mainstream bourgeois outlets and the recipient of a Sundance audience award and grand jury nomination. Circumstance is, for Houshyar, a film that plays to the liberal gallery, a glossy and easy-to-digest film which has us shaking our heads and tut-tutting in smug superiority.
Although I am not wholly convinced by Houshyar’s position, it is certainly true to say that one of the most striking features of Facing mirrors is the suffocating banality of the ‘axis of evil’ terror state. When a cross-dressing Eddie indulges in a spot of road rage early in the film, chasing through the dense traffic to catch up with a speeding cut-in, the police pull her over. After a brief attempt at blagging her way out of trouble, Eddie finds herself hauled down to the local station and on the receiving end of a savage ‘correctional’ beating. In the space of just two scenes Facing mirrors is essentially able to dash between two extremes of Iranian social interaction, from the mundane to the horrifying, with the most uncanny ease. Now, nobody would suppose that the entirety of Iranian society was comprised of black-robed women, gun-toting revolutionary guards and cackling clerics, but equally this glimpse into Iranian life is restrictively rare in the west. Contra Melanie Phillips-type Daily Mail ranting, this is a country where apparent messianic, nuclear-apocalyptic death cults co-exist with sensible speed limits and the odd seatbelt. Similarly the character of Rana offers us, speaking bluntly, a portrait of a sympathetic bigot. Her fragility and struggle with adversity do not excuse her prejudicial dislike of Eddie, but, even before the pair’s reconciliation midway through the film, Rana is clearly a human being, susceptible to all the foibles and weaknesses that fleshy definition entails. In short, this devout woman is a world away from messianic nuclear-apocalyptic death cults.
Facing mirrors is difficult viewing for the big festival circuit because it exhibits for us the common experiences shared between the Iranian people and ourselves, and the starting point from which we might actually begin to recognise the roots of some of the violence stoked in Iranian society by the regime. Equally though, the film does not shy away from the fact that those ‘roots of violence’ are distinctly Iranian: imperialism has a great deal to answer for, but it is the clerical regime specifically that fosters the violent homophobic/transphobic paranoia which leads to Eddie’s beating. Tellingly in that regard, her salvation is sought in Germany and the west, not that already offered under the wing of her native tyrants.
This then brings me to my second layer of prior ignorance: namely the sheer complexity of the Iranian government’s attitude towards LGBT persons. Unfortunately I, and many other well-meaning comrades, I am sure, had in years gone by bought wholly into the usefully uncomplicated view of Iran as the ‘big evil’; the complete antithesis of our own wonderfully liberal-secular brand of blanket tolerance. I simply could not have conceived of the possibility that not only is sex reassignment surgery (SRS) legal and part-subsidised in Iran, but that, as a survey conducted in 2008 showed, Iran actually performs the second highest number of sex reassignment operations in the world; to the extent that it has become something of an SRS hub for the Gulf region.2
Once again, for clarity I should emphatically stress that the Iranian government’s vicious reputation is more than earned. Homosexuality and repeat ‘sodomy’ offences still carry the death penalty; and the Iranian authorities’ track record since 1979 suggests little hesitation to use that option when available. More to the point, to infer that Iranian state-subsidised SRS was provided altruistically would be a monumental absurdity. For the regime the surgery solves a simple problem: curing the ‘disease’ of homosexuality and transsexualism and ‘fixing’ people so they might reintegrate into the mainstream society of the Islamic Republic. Those who sign up for SRS are then committed to it under any eventuality, exposed to the legal system in a way that sees non-trans homosexuals coerced into procedures simply to protect themselves from the mortal danger of being ‘out’.3
Clearly Facing mirrors does not shy away from these facts. The fundamental thrust of the film must be that the legitimation of SRS has little bearing on the social acceptance of both SRS as a practice and the trans population as a whole. Although my original instinctual prejudices may be given some weight by this, the basic truth still remains: my assumption that the Iranian government’s hostility towards homosexuals would obviously extend to the transgendered was factually wrong (to say nothing of my potentially patronising enthusiasm to transplant western-liberal lump-groupings - ‘LGBT’ - to an environment where the circumstances are politically quite different). In effect I had put an emotional attachment to a particular ideal ahead of a rational engagement with what was actually going on, and was all the poorer for it.
Returning to our present situation, what with the US-Iran honeymoon in full swing, a film like Facing mirrors actually offers a sceptic like me a cautionary lesson. Primarily, as I said at the start, Iran is a country of contradiction. But that contradiction cuts both ways. In the Ahmadinejad years it came in the form of a blustering little man presiding over a land full of Eddies and Ranas. If America really had seen its war rolled over into the next phase, it is the Eddies and Ranas who would have borne (as always) the brunt of the suffering. Under Hassan Rowhani, a welcomed ‘peacemaker’ for the west, that contradiction is far more obscure, but no less awful. Look at his treatment of Iran’s prisoners: under the cover of pardons for some he slips in the hanging of scores of others. A hundred more executions were conducted in 2013 than the previous year, bringing the total to 650-odd, two thirds of which where conducted under the ‘moderate’ Rowhani’s relatively short watch.4 In the one full month of 2014 he has already racked up more than 70.
The western left would do well to remember these facts alongside the humanising validity of films like Facing mirrors. The SWP/Stop the War Coalition’s one-time argument, extrapolating wildly from revelations of the type presented here, that the regime could not possibly be that bad because of that ‘good’ sex change record, sticks in the craw just as much the dangerous, chauvinist Matgamna-isms warning us about the jealous “Islamo-fascist” hordes. Of course, the clerical regime is an enemy of the international left, but at the same time it is an enemy that will only be overcome by being rationally understood and examined for the human creation that it is. We must do better than buying into the binary of simply rejecting or bear-hugging imperialism’s slanders. After all, outrage comes cheap, and can be dropped as quickly as it was whipped up in the face of a capitulation and re-admittance into the fold of hegemonic capital.
Notes
1. http://ajammc.com/2013/05/11/queer-and-trans-subjects-in-iranian-cinema-between-representation-agency-and-orientalist-fantasies/.
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7259057.stm.
3. www.theguardian.com/world/2007/sep/25/iran.roberttait.
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/world/middleeast/iran-surge-in-executions-worries-rights-experts.html?_r=0.