EXAM (EMTEHAN)
Iran, 2002, 80 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Nasser Rafaie.
Exam is a brief but very effective piece of Iranian film-making. It focuses on a couple of hours one morning when girls are assembling at school to sit for an exam. The film uses what is often called a Robert Altman-like technique insofar as the camera moves from one group of people or individuals to another, making its way around the street outside the school and into the schoolyard. In this way, it involves its audience in the life and atmosphere of the school, the anxieties of the girls, the pressures of their parents, the particular squabbles amongst the girls as well as friendships. In its brief way, it offers a microcosm of Islamic society in Tehran, and a special glimpse of the microcosm of women in Iranian society.
1. This film within the context of the Iranian film industry, focus on people, social situations? The cinematic skill of the director, the structure of the film, the fluid movement and revelation of characters and interactions?
2. Iranian society, the school and the microcosm of society, the focus on women, men the young?
3. The title and its focus?
4. The location, the outside gaze at the gate and the building, at the beginning and end? The street, the cars, the arrivals, the activity outside the gate, the opening of the gate, inside the yard?
5. The structure of the film: the arrivals, indications of characters, character sketches, longer situations, the various links and the fluidity of movement, the cumulative effect, the repetition, especially at the end in seeing all the characters as they went into the exam?
6. The school authorities, the public address system, and it atmosphere, impersonal? The rules, the people at the gate, having the cards, the girl who was trying to enter without a card and her not being permitted?
7. The focus on the girls and the women, their dress, their hopes, study or not, ambitions?
8. The range and selection of characters: the mother with the baby, feeding it, changing its nappy, waiting for her husband to turn up, his failure to arrive, her going away at the end? The surly woman and her pills, not thanking the girl who helped her? The woman with the black eye and her friend, their discussion about relationships? The group and frightening the scared girl, with the little bird, the ladder and putting it back and its nest? The modern girl and her boyfriend, and her prodding him with feminist ideas? The mother who wanted to be a matchmaker, embarrassing her daughter? The girl in the wheelchair? The flirtatious man and his wife, her wheeling the chair, looking at her husband with the young girls, the talk in dialect, his joking? The protective mother and her daughter, the girls fighting and the girl intervening? The man who was against his wife doing the exam, his male attitudes towards her role in the family? The young policeman, his story, recounting it to the girls, his shyness? The tough young men and their stances? The father whose daughter fainted and his being upset?
9. Insight into characters, situations? A portrait of Iran?
