This is a tough, no-holds-barred animation about inequality, harshness, and deceit in sexual relationships. It focuses on four neighbours – a sex worker and her six-year-old son, a young male musician, and a childless woman who, illegally, and without her husband knowing, has secretly had two abortions to avoid being tied to the home.
Its rotoscope technique – digitally combining traced studio-filmed action with real street and cityscapes – makes it possible to convincingly locate in Tehran scenes it would have been impossible to film there. The opening scene, for example, has Pari blow-jobbing a taxi driver while her mute son sits in the back seat. But the technique effectively detaches us too from immediate horrors, to focus on the relationships between people, and to follow their intertwining stories, which are involved, convincing and involving.
