Adapted from the Iranian magical realist novel of the same name, Women without Men is a beautiful piece of cinematography and storytelling. The film is visually stunning, and director Shirin Neshat elegantly weaves together the personal stories of four women surrounded by wider political and cultural conflict.

The film begins on a rooftop. The house below is white, contrasted sharply against the blue sky and the black of the chador and hair of the woman standing there. She wanders around the rooftop, occasionally peering over the side while the call to prayer echoes around her. Each time, we see her face and then a shot of the sidewalk below. Finally, the woman leans forward, and her hair floats back towards the camera. Her chador hits the ground, and she soars through the sky as we hear her voice say, “Now I’ll have silence… silence… and nothing.” The sound of running water breaks the silence of several shots of clouds; a small stream appears. The camera pans along the stream while the woman’s voiceover resumes, saying, “And I thought, the only freedom from pain is to be free from the world.” Once she finishes speaking, the camera centers around a small opening in a wall through which the stream continues. The camera advances along the stream and through the opening into a mystical orchard during a two-minute continuous shot, until the title of the movie appears on the screen.

The detail of this opening scene is important because the sequence introduces several key aspects of the film: the cultural context of the story, indicated by the call to prayer and the chador; the centrality of women; the magical realism of certain sequences; and the context of the orchard as an escape from the world and its pain. Neshat successfully introduces and expands upon these themes throughout the film in a concise but artistic way that puts Women without Men in a class of its own within the first ten minutes.

Women without Men follows the story of four women: Munis, the woman from the opening sequence; her naive and conservative friend Faezeh; a young prostitute named Zarin; and a worldly woman of the Iranian bourgeoisie, Fakhri. After the opening sequence, the movie flashes back to an afternoon when Munis is trying to listen to the radio in order to participate in the life and conflicts taking place just outside her door, and her brother, Amir Khan, rips the cord from the radio to force her to make dinner and prepare for a suitor’s visit; Faezeh seeks to marry him and share his conservative lifestyle. Her purity makes no difference, however, as he is set to marry a woman who is rumored to not be a virgin. Zarin’s storyline, in contrast to Faezeh and Munis’s lives of domesticity, begins in a brothel where she lives a monotonous, yet draining, life that is interrupted one day by the traumatic hallucination of faceless men. Each man that she sees, starting with one of her own clients, has no face. She runs to the baths and scrubs herself till she bleeds, trying to cleanse herself of the impurity that is causing the hallucination. When neither bathing nor prayer works, she leaves the city and the pain of the world, and begins walking down a long road under a blue sky.

Meanwhile, Fakhri faces demons of her own within the elite and privileged circles from which the other three women are excluded. A former lover returns from America, and her disillusionment and disappointment with her husband, an army general, reaches such an intensity that she decides to leave. She retreats from the pain to a secluded orchard managed by a quiet, unobtrusive male gardener, down the long road under a blue sky, and begins an independent life there.

The story finally returns to the opening sequence when Faezeh and Amir Khan find Munis dead on the sidewalk. To save his and his family’s reputation, Amir Khan buries her in the garden while Faezeh looks on. She is traumatized, but life goes on for Faezeh until the day of Amir Khan’s wedding; in the midst of a celebration of his success and happiness, Munis comes back to life and leaves his house for good to pursue her own interests and goals. But when the shame that she feels becomes too much for Faezeh after she is raped, Munis is able to guide her down the long road under the blue sky because Munis has already been to the orchard. Munis reenters life after a retreat from the world, a future that we are then able to envision for Faezeh and Fakhri. Zarin, however, is not strong enough for the world outside the orchard and eventually dies from exposure to it. The film ends with Munis’s reflection on why all four women wanted to escape: they wanted to find “a new form, a new way. Release.”

From an aesthetic perspective, I noticed that Neshat and the film’s director of cinematography, Martin Gschlacht, manipulate light and color (especially blue and white) to create an ethereal effect. The characters of Zarin and Munis are the two centers of magical realism in the story, with extraordinarily surreal experiences like hallucinating men without faces and coming back to life, and they are also the centers of Gschlacht’s manipulation of blue and white. Each camera shot is so precise and a piece of art in its own right that while watching the film, I felt I was seeing the world in an entirely new way.

The film makes certain changes to the original story written by Shahrnush Parsipur on which the film is based that are worth highlighting. For example, the role of the gardener is never explained and minimally explored in the film, despite the fact that he plays a central role in the book. The environmental symbolism of the novel, culminating in plot points such as one character’s eventual transformation into a tree, is barely touched upon in the film. The film only lightly alludes to this storyline when Fakhri finds Zarin partially submerged in a pool in the orchard, almost as though she and the orchard were one. Most notably, the film spends a significant amount of time depicting the Iranian Revolution, which is much less of a focal point in the novel. Neshat is an expatriate of Iran, and uses the film as an opportunity to add a political dimension to the story that the author never makes explicit in the book. Although some may see these changes as a loss to the story, I believe that they simplify and streamline the plot, which allows the film to more effectively communicate the parallel between the women’s search for a new way and a new form of being, and Iran’s struggle for independence and autonomy. Fakhri is disappointed by both her proud Iranian husband and her Westernized lover, while Iran is left broken by competing ideologies and world powers. Faezeh is learning how to reconcile her conservative past and beliefs with respect for herself and faith in her own strength, just as Iran is trying to balance elements of conservatism and modernism in its society. Above all, Zarin reminds us that unless women are prioritized and nurtured, unless they are given the space to be women without men, Iran’s progress is unsustainable.