Pink Asparagus

BY Maggie Roberts

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL WORLD PREMIERE!

This society is bipolar.

Tehran, Under the Skin is a film full of contradictions. The documentary, directed by Afsaneh Salari, explores the popularity of the plastic surgery industry in contemporary Tehran. The film takes on something similar to a cinéma vérité style; however, the camera is still addressed out of curiosity and suspicion by patients, doctors and office staff. In one scene, a young woman tries to calm herself before surgery. In between meditative breaths, she tells the director (and the audience) what her motivations are for altering her face — this specific procedure is a rhinoplasty. After we hear the director’s faint voice off-camera tell the young woman that she has a beautiful natural nose, the patient responds: “Please don’t say that. It will make me second-guess my decision again. Perhaps I rushed into this.” Other women are completely thrilled with their results, releasing tears of joy as the doctor removes the bloodied bandages. Under stitched skin and bruised under-eyes, the women’s faces light up with simultaneous happiness and relief.

What is striking about the documentary is its refusal to depict Iranian women as monolithic. Some of these women are from the city, and lots travel from other, more rural, provinces. Some are religious, donning hijabs or choosing to be off-camera altogether, and others take pride in putting their hair on display, including styles, textures and shades of all types. The women also disagree. Salari asks patients in the waiting room what their views on cosmetic surgeries are, and the answers she receives are diverse. However, the film is not obtuse to the systemic pressures imposed on Iranian women. Salari’s film brings into focus the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement, an Iranian activist slogan used to protest the murder of Mahsah Amini by Iran’s religious police. The film frames plastic surgery as a symptom of a patriarchal model which makes women internalize their supposed inferiority. Starkly contrasted against the backdrop of the US-Israel War on Iran, a conflict never directly dictated but blatantly present, the sterile walls of the doctor’s waiting room become a site for productive feminist discourse amongst and for women, one which embraces the contradictory and the grey.

Tehran, Under the Skin plays at TIFF September 15, and 17.