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The Stoning of Soraya M review
:. Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh
:. Starring: Shohreh Aghdashloo, Jim Caviezel
:. Script: Cyrus Nowrasteh Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh
:. Running Time: 1:56
:. Year: 2009
:. Country: USA
:. Official Site: The Stoning of Soraya M
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Based on a true story and Freidoune Sahebjam's eponymous best-seller, The Stoning of Soraya M. is a haunting and powerful work, a political vehicle that denounces some archaic and unofficial rules that have no place in our civilized contemporary world.
Some might say it's fate — or god — that brought Mr. Sahebjam (Jim Caviezel — The Passion of the Christ), a French Iranian journalist, to a remote Iranian village when his car died. While his car is getting repaired, he meets a local woman, Zarah (the beautiful Shohreh Aghdashloo — 24, House of Sand and Fog) who insists on telling him the story of her niece, Soraya (Mozhan Marno). Because she didn't want to divorce her husband, an influential man who wanted to marry a 14 year-old girl, the latter, with the help of the local clergy, plots to get rid of her by wrongfully accusing her of cheating which is punishable by stoning.
Avoiding the traps of melodrama, the film focuses on slowly unfolding the steps that bring to the unavoidable punishment, through the eyes of Zarah and Soraya. While the director is a man, The Stoning of Soraya M. is definitely a feminist movie, showcasing the strength of women, while men are portrayed as hypocritical and cowards.
The society described here is surprisingly medieval, women being treated as slave-like inferior beings whose role is to work while men rule with impunity, like nepotistic kings whose main activity seems to be sitting and talking about nothing. The fact that the husband gets the help from the clergy to reach his goals also clearly denounces how religion can be used for political agendas by hypocritical men, which can obviously be transposed to any religion and most particularly Christianity. To avoid any confusion and polemic, the filmmakers however make it clear that they are not attacking the religion itself — in this case Islam — but the men who twist and use it for their own benefit. As for the barbaric act of stoning, this is the premise of this movie and obviously what the filmmakers and the book are trying to stop. In case you're wondering, stoning isn't part of the Koran and infidelity is almost impossible to prove due to a series of far-fetched laws; this underlines what we are being shown here, the fact that stoning is only the decision of men and a reflection of the cruelty that inhabits them.
As for the stoning itself, I must admit that, as a critic, I was wondering during the entire movie how the filmmakers would choose to approach it. As the fateful moment came, I realized that the choice they made, how painful it was, was the only choice there was. The stoning scene is indeed shot in a documentary-like manner, going for full frontal realism with a lengthy and unbearable sequence that had most of the audience crying or hiding their eyes. By making us the voyeurs of the execution and confronting us with the horror of this act, The Stoning of Soraya M. doesn't go for a sadistic and gratuitous infliction of pain on the audience, just for thrills, but rather hits us hard to make us react and get us involved in propagating a message aiming at stopping stoning. This is certainly a bold move that takes the risk to annihilate a big part of the audience, an artistic decision that declassifies the film as pure entertainment to make it a humanitarian vehicle. And the fact that the actors seem to be transcending their acting to give their soul to their role (from an exhilarated Shohreh Aghdashloo to a dignified Mozhan Marno and an deglamorized Jim Caviezel) and that the film breathes with a sober realism emphasizes the fact that you're not just watching cinema … and that it is time to get involved and support this cause …
Fred Thom
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