Makers of issue-based films often tend to take the easier route of conveying their message through long-winded dialogues and sloganeering. The script would read like a good old pamphlet. There is a kind of drilling it into your head that happens in many films of this ilk, that drives away even those who are concerned about the issue at hand. The issue is very much there, but cinema is non-existent.
Iranian filmmaker Behnam Behzadi’s Inversion is not an issue-based film. Rather, it tells the intense personal story of an independent woman, who is hemmed in from all sides by relatives who are least concerned about her opinions. But at the centre of it all is air pollution, which has made life difficult in Tehran.
The entire sequence of events in the family, which forms the narrative, starts from the rising pollution levels in the city. The title itself refers to an atmospheric condition, where the toxicity of the air shoots up alarmingly. The story could very well have happened in present day Delhi or any other major city facing life-threatening pollution.
Niloofar runs a tailoring shop, giving employment to a handful of women. Her mother, who lives with her, is admitted to a hospital with a serious respiratory problem, caused by the air of Tehran. The doctors recommend her to be immediately moved out of the city, to the northern part of the country. Without consulting her, Niloofar’s siblings take a decision that she should be the one who would accompany their mother in living far away from Tehran.
Niloofar is not very keen on the move, what with she being in the beginning of a relationship with her old friend and also considering how passionate she is about her shop, which she has been running for over a decade. She agrees reluctantly. But with more decisions related to her life being taken without her knowledge by those around her, she decides to invert the power structure.
The narrative around the family is something that those familiar to Iranian cinema would easily warm up to, having been treated to similar intense takes from that part of the world. There are emotional exchanges, especially those with her overbearing brother, that would make the audience seethe with anger. The brother’s is the desperate fight of the conservatives in Iran, who have in recent times faced challenges from independent women.
However, it is the weaving in of the element of air pollution, without making a slogan out of it, that makes Inversion a standout attempt. The film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, was screened in the World Cinema category at the 21st International Film Festival of Kerala.
