Danger is never very far away in Noora Niasari’s confident debut, a deeply personal tribute to a generation torn between tradition and modernity. Focusing on the title character, Shayda hangs on a vulnerable but powerful performance from Holy Spider’s Zar Amir Ebrahimi as an Iranian divorcée hiding out from her abusive ex, who may or may not be planning to smuggle their daughter Mona (Selina Zahednia) back to Iran.
This fear is played out in the jittery opening sequence, set in 1995, when Shayda and Vi (Jillian Nguyen), a social worker of sorts, scope out an airport with Mona in tow. Both women impress upon Mona what to do if she should ever end up there against her will, noting repeatedly that blue uniforms equate with safety. Back at the women’s shelter, a shared hostel in a fiercely secret suburban location, Shayda wonders how she got to this point: in a very subtle piece of exposition, her photo album reveals that she graduated in 1984 and was married the next year. Moving to Australia in 1991 appears to be the year the tectonic plates of her marriage began to move apart.
As we already know from Iranian cinema classics such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), divorce is a very serious matter within the culture — so much so that Shayda even faces pushback from her own mother, who tells her, “No one’s life is perfect,” adding, “At least he’s a good father.” But what’s interesting about Niasari’s telling of this tale is that it’s not about a woman’s flight into secularism; Shayda is proud of her Persian heritage, and it’s no coincidence that her story takes place against the backdrop of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. Mona learns Iranian words every day, and Shayda even quotes soothing scripture to a woman in the shelter who fears her son has been taken from her.
For a short while, it’s unclear whether the ex will appear or remain an offscreen presence, and when Hossein (Osamah Sami) finally turns up, he is something on an anti-climax, taking his daughter out, unsupervised, for a fast-food lunch after the judge grants temporary half-day access. When Hossein doesn’t return on time, Shayda fears the worst, but his passive-aggressive retort — “I wouldn’t be late if I had more time with her” — is revealing. Hossein’s attitude to Shayda, and women in general, is one of condescension. Indeed, an ‘educational’ book about a father and his daughter that he shows to Mona leads her to ask, “What about Mum?” “No,” he says, “it’s only about Dad.”
This culture-clash aspect of the film is its richest seam. “Oh, so you’re a western girl now,” sneers Hossein, even though Australia isn’t quite the west, in terms of textbook geography, and Shayda has developed her own thrift-shop look that seems to rest between fashions. The “progressive” friends that Hossein looks down on are students, and it’s interesting to note that Shayda’s own studies abroad came to an end when the regime in Tehran cancelled her scholarship. Like the regime, Hossein sees independent thought as rebellion, warning her, “You can change your appearance, but it doesn’t change who you really are.” In fact, he means what she really is: to him, she’s his wife, his property.
Things become more heated when Hossein follows her and takes incriminating photos that he thinks will prove she’s being unfaithful. Back home, such evidence would be incendiary — “They’ll kill you,” he says, without having to specify who “they” are — and from here Shayda becomes a little more schematic in its storytelling, building to a climax that turns its theme of intangible psychological violence into something immediate and real.
However, even at its most conventional, Niasari’s film is always respectful of the reality behind its fiction, alluding to the full spectrum of domestic abuse in the obliquely glimpsed stories of the women who pass through Shayda’s shelter, their shattered lives held together by the quietly heroic Vi. There’s hope here, too, in the resourceful, thoughtful Mona, and the green shoots of renewal are always present, the film’s only real measurement of passing time being a bowl of sprouting lentils that Shayda keeps by the kitchen sink.
Title: Shayda
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Release date: December 1, 2023
Director/screenwriter: Noora Niasari
Cast: Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Selina Zahednia, Osamah Sami, Jillian Nguyen
Running time: 1 hr, 57 min
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Source: DLine
