The Day I Became a Woman

The first film by Marziyeh Meshkini (the wife of Mohsen Makhmalbaf) consists of portraits of women of three generations: a girl who is told on her ninth birthday that she is now a woman and thus may no longer play with the boy next door; a young woman who has left her husband to take part in a women's bicycle race; and a woman who, reaching the end of her life, buys all the furniture and appliances she always wanted and has them laid out on a beach in a kind of inside-out modern house -- kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom. If Meshkini's film, with its range of styles and narrative modes (from the naturalism of the first episode to the surrealism of the third), is very much a debut director's I'll-show-you-what-I-can-do portfolio piece, it's a highly successful one, emotionally involving and visually fluid -- especially in the second episode, in which every shot is a camera movement. At the Avon.
-- Chris Fujiwara