Women Without Men - an extension, or 95-minute remix, of the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat's well-regarded video installations - takes the form of a patchwork movie, detailing the lives of four women living in Iran during the CIA-sponsored coup d'état in 1953. Though men are ever present in one form or another - the Shah, British and American troops, the demonstrators on the street - Neshat's thesis is that there was no-one on hand to support these women when they most needed it, or to catch them when they fell; in the case of the suicidally curious Munis (Shabnam Toulouei), this proves a particularly deadly absence. (As shown, it will require another woman's touch and patience, her sensitivity to the world around her, to bring Munis back to life.)Elsewhere, the men we see are uncaring or indifferent, like those wearing away at the lacerated brothel girl Zarin - an unexpected appearance here from Orsi Toth, the travelling bag of bones who, in the films of Hungarian miserablist Kornel Mondruczo, has done more than any actress to take the fun out of nudity, and thus, in Neshat's hands, becomes an angular tool with which to neutralise the male gaze. The casting of Toth perhaps sets up expectations of grim realism, yet her anti-Scheherazade - the courtesan who would make any sane man run a thousand miles in the opposite direction - signals Neshat's desire to subvert the standard Arabian Nights framework, with its male-oriented and male-controlled storytelling. In Women Without Men, the fantasy elements are all in place - the misty glades and stagnant swamps are straight out of a fairytale, as is the unexplained revival of characters thought dead - but there's no sign of a happy ending, that love might just conquer all.
Maybe that's as life was in 50s Iran, yet one recurring frustration with this difficult feature is how - right from the title, with its insinuation of both independence and lack - it seems to occupy a state of betweenness. Too widescreen to languish as an installation, yet not entirely satisfactory as cinema, it converted what would have been a provocative gallery encounter into a fairly glum night at the Curzon Mayfair. (This DVD release naturally encourages viewers to reshape their living rooms into conceptual art spaces.) When Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad), middle-aged wife of a general, is inducted into a secret society of "decadent" poets, playwrights and actresses, we can be fairly certain it won't be long before hubby and his troops come knocking at her front door. Any visual and narrative pleasure in Women Without Men comes to be turned against itself; for all Neshat's stunning imagemaking, it remains a pointed text, a prepared statement, more than it is a fully-realised picture.
Women Without Men is available on DVD from Monday.
