the unwanted woman

"Iranian filmmaker Tahmineh Milani (The Hidden Half, Two Women), who has been jailed and even sentenced (unsuccessfully) to death for her frank treatment of female-male relations, here rebounds undeterred with her scorching honesty fully intact. The title Unwanted Woman applies directly to her heroine — a dignified teacher in her mid-30s whose husband openly cheats on her. Yet it also applies to the doll-faced floozy upon whom her mate now showers his ardor — a social outcast desperate for stability, wronged in her own way by their society’s institutional hypocrisies. Milani puts this threesome through a suspenseful road trip in which the everyday tensions of taking a drive in a police state are constant and observed with razor-sharp tact. The women’s heads stay covered throughout, and husband and wife are never shown in bed (all in strict keeping with Iranian censorship guidelines), but Milani cleverly and logically structures the film to justify these restraints with a verve worthy of Lubitsch under the Hays code. The film does disintegrate into big speeches as it rounds to its climax — but through these characters, Milani hauntingly maps the souls of men and women at odds in a theocracy." (F.X. Feeney, L.A. Weekly, June 24, 2005)