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Unveiled

2005, Movie, NR, 97 mins

Unveiled: Review

Shot in a raw, semi-documentary style, filmmaker Angelina Maccrone's powerful drama is an emotional exploration of one woman's flight from persecution into something a bit more ambiguous, but nonetheless threatening. The minute her Teheran-to-Frankfurt flight leaves Iranian airspace, 29-year-old translator Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmin Tabatabai) finds another purpose for the black headscarf she's required to wear at home: She uses it to plug up the bathroom smoke detector, then lights up a highly forbidden cigarette. Fariba won't be needing her veils or head-covers ever again: She's leaving Iran for good. Fariba's liberation, however, is short lived, for she's arrested the minute she tries to pass through customs at Germany's Frankfurt airport. Her papers are obviously forged, and even though she claims to have left Iran to escape political persecution, her petition for asylum must be approved at a hearing. It's then that the truth about her flight from Iran comes out: Fariba had been caught in a relationship with another woman, a transgression that's punishable by death in "modern" fundamentalist Iran. The fact that she originally lied about being a political refugee has cast a pall of suspicion over Fariba, and she's about to be deported back to Iran when a sudden tragedy presents itself as a desperate opportunity: Siamak (Navid Akhavan), a fellow refugee, commits suicide, and when Fariba finds his as-yet undiscovered body in his bunk at the detention center, she hides it in his large suitcase. She then cuts her hair, dons his glasses and assumes his identity. The deception goes unnoticed and "Siamak" is granted temporary residence until the legitimacy of "his" request for asylum can be determined. The downside is that Fariba must now live her life as a man until she's no longer under the watchful eyes of the German authorities. Sent to live in a cramped room filled with men in a half-way house in a small provincial town, Fariba waits until everyone's asleep before she undresses to bathe, and she manages to find ways to avoid the prying gaze of her male coworkers at the sauerkraut factory where she's lucky enough to find work. But when she begins to fall for Anne (Anneke Kim Sarnau), a single-mother who works along side Fariba, her masquerade takes a dangerous turn. The obvious point of reference here is BOYS DON’T CRY (1999), and while Fariba and Brandon Teena wear men's clothes for completely different reasons, it's not an entirely superficial comparison. Both films expose the threat posed when women dare to tread on masculine ground by crossing gender lines, and it's clearly a threat that’s felt just as keenly in Germany as it is in Iran. But Maccarone's powerful and incisive feature also has much in common with Pawel Pawlikowski's LAST RESORT (2000), namely in its depiction of the grim limbo stateless people find themselves consigned to when the search for a better life lands them in a country that doesn't entirely trust them. Thanks largely to Tabatabai's superb performance, it's on this level that Maccarone's film is most affecting. leave a comment --Ken Fox