“Tehran Taboo” doesn't hold anything back, save for the fact that it is animated. In Ali Soozandeh's wild rotoscoped debut feature, he depicts the increasingly entangled stories of three people in Tehran. Pari (Elmira Rafizadeh), a street-savvy but jaded sex worker demands a divorce and an education for her mute son. Sara (Zar Amir Ebrahimi), a soft-spoken pregnant woman seeks work despite her husband's strict orders to stay at home “for the baby's sake.” Finally, Babak (Arash Marandi), a struggling musician, is flung into an absurd search to replicate an unbroken hymen for his one-night stand. In the trio's search for propriety in Tehran's underbelly, the three find that their worlds, strangely, overlap more than they initially thought.
Their growing kinship is made clear at the turning point of the film, when Sara joins her neighbor, Pari, at her veranda. Perhaps, in a different world, they wouldn't have met at all. Pari and her son just moved into this apartment thanks to a concubine agreement she has made with the judge of the Islamic Revolutionary court in order to file her divorce papers. Sara only there because she cannot leave under her pseudo-house arrest, thanks to her paranoid husband and gossipy mother-in-law. However, in this one, moment of respite – where the two can converse, away from judgmental eyes, for once – they giggle about strawberry-flavored condoms and shy boys, clinking their glasses of wine in friendship. For just a few fleeing minutes, they are not women in relation to all these other men and family ties and children, but instead, just themselves as Sara and Pari having a good laugh.
This precious snapshot of companionship between these two adult women is compelling and haunted at once. After a distant series of shot-reverse-shots, Pari joins Sara's side to pull off a prank that would change their lives. Soon, they find out, their short-lived camaraderie would end in tragedy. This one innocent joke together would ultimately cost one of them her life, and the other, the loss of a dear friend. Thus marks the biting irony, of “Tehran Taboo”: even these small bits of feminine gaiety are ultimately overshadowed by what would become the suffocating gravitas of male “dignity.” The politics of respectability poisons the well of everyday joy.
But for now, let the two drink.
