In Saeed Roustaee’s “Woman and Son,” an initially low-key drama that takes a shattering and tragic, pain is an all-encompassing experience. Even at a Cannes Film Festival that hasn’t been lacking for pain, with one agonizing experience playing after another, few can hold a candle to the darkness that increasingly consumes this story. It’s a feel-bad film like no other where you have to squint for even the smallest sliver of hope as we, along with the characters, get put through the wringer with little potential for salvation.
While unrelenting in how much the film launches us onto this, it’s also well-acted and authentic to what the sudden, preventable loss of a loved one would feel like. It’s far from perfect, increasingly leaning heavily on the performances to carry the experience through some shaky escalations that twist the knife even further, though you can’t bring yourself to look away from it. Even when you wonder whether it’s coming close to being excessively cruel to the characters, risking flattening them, the eventual moments of humanity add a greater dimension.
Premiering Thursday in competition at the festival, the film primarily follows Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar), a widow and nurse who is trying to raise her son Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) just as she is somewhat secretly preparing to marry her boyfriend Hamid (Payman Maadi). We see their daily routines, all ordinary yet still compelling in how lived-in they feel, and come to understand each of them. Mahnaz is a caring mother, but Aliyar can be quite a handful, leaving her to argue with teachers at his school to give him a break after he gets in trouble. She still loves Aliyar and wants to see him find a bit more stability, as does the viewer. In the broad strokes, all this could feel like a dramedy of sorts with some more recurrently thoughtful camera moves where we look down upon the world from above. It’s almost as if something has foretold that disaster is about to strike.
After it immerses us in the textures of this corner of everyday Iranian life for Mahnaz and her family, everything she holds dear is dashed. This starts with a betrayal that is communicated first through a stare then the world’s most awkward phone call before it becomes something even more devastating as a death befalls the family. Without tipping off the specifics of this, as the shocking impact of it is certainly intentional in terms of how the film gently builds to it before pulling the rug out from under us, it jettisons the tone of everything we’d seen up until then. Instead of a more humble story of a woman trying to hold her life together, we see that this is no longer an option for her. While certainly sudden in how this is deployed, life is full of such tragedies and there is no neat narrative to fit them into. Sometimes, there is no escaping the suffering.
This ultimately loses some of the more quietly moving details that the film had been teasing out, with one slightly comedic sequence involving a lock that gets jammed at Aliyar’s school feeling tragic in retrospect in that you wish you could go back to the more ordinary chaos it represented. “Woman and Child” sees Roustaee turning domestic interactions on their head, making them into a battleground that pummels the heart and soul.
In the eye of this storm is Izadyar who, even when the film can feel like it’s losing a grasp on the material, holds tightly to the emotional core. As her character’s life understandably becomes all about dealing with the aftermath of what was taken from her, it’s the silent moments where you feel the weight on her shoulders and see the pain in her eyes. It cuts just as deeply as the bigger, cascading confrontations that come to be the driving narrative focus as she tries to seek something resembling justice, where we know there is likely to be none.
In many regards, it’s hard to imagine “Woman and Son” holding together without Izadyar at its center. There is much about it that can feel schematic in the suffering it drags us through. It holds “Woman and Child” back from achieving a more grim greatness, but the presence of Izadyar remains a grounding force that always manages to pull it back from the brink.