Behnam Behzadi’s film is a sombre, subdued family drama set in Tehran about the insidious patriarchal forces that conspire, almost without entirely knowing it and certainly without admitting it, against independent-minded women. It is a misogynist oppression as all-pervasive as the smog that settles everywhere on the city. For another director, this might have been a more straightforwardly emotional story of a dutiful daughter, the kind of drama that could have interested Ozu or Douglas Sirk – and in many ways that is what it is here. But Inversion is more downbeat, more oblique in ways that might not have attracted those film-makers. It is an involving story, but I found it sometimes a little dessicated, and the ending rather shies away from the intractable dilemmas that had been so painful.
Sahar Dolatshahi plays Niloofar, a smart, attractive hardworking woman who has made a success of her tailoring business. She is dating a nice man who is besotted with her, and lives with her unwell elderly mother Mahin (Shirin Yazdanbakhsh), whose ailing lungs are badly affected by the city’s pollution. When the doctors decree she must move to the clean air of the countryside, Niloofar’s arrogant, deadbeat brother Farhad (Ali Mosaffa) high-handedly decides Niloofar must abandon her work and move there, too, to nurse her, and then sells Niloofar’s shop to pay off his own business debts. Meanwhile, the elder sister considers she has done her bit by offering her husband’s rustic family villa, and paying Niloofar an allowance. It is carefully and intelligently acted, although Niloofar’s revolt, when it comes, seems to involve less being at stake than we thought.
