Movie Nation

There are messy movies and shambolic comedies, and then there’s whatever the hell “Last Call” is supposed to be.

It’s a “back to the old neighborhood” dramady almost guaranteed to give you a hangover. I’m on my third aspirin already, and I haven’t had a drop.

Unlike everybody else in this boozy, lazy, unfunny “redemption” tale about the “success” who “got out” of Darby Heights (Upper Darby, Philly), went Ivy League, but never lost his “Jersey Shore” loving edge.

Jeremy Piven is Mick Callahan, 50ish and single and working for an unscrupulous Italian-American developer (Garry Pastore) who wants to build a casino in the old ‘hood.

Mick, supposedly a high roller with a top-end desk job, is arm-twisted into getting names on a petition to get the locals, most of whom he’s known since childhood, to stop putting “Casi-NO” signs in their yards.

He’ll have to work that in around his mother’s wake. She’s gone, and now there’s just his aged dad (Jack McGee), another “mick” running another Irish bar, Callahan’s Pub. He’s third generation, but without Mick to float loans to save the place or quit his job and run it, “The Bucket” isn’t long for this world, steady clientele (Bruce Dern as “Coach”) be damned.

Because Mick’s no-good muscle-bound lady-killer “big brother” (Zack McGowan) is headed back to prison, and on a bit of a bender as he braces for that eventuality.

Back to the Heights means Mick might run into his childhood crush, Ali (Taryn Manning of “Orange is the New Black” and “Hustle & Flow”) and her kvetching, cooking, cussing Greek mom (Cathy Moriarty, in rare form).

As they guzzle through Mick’s Mom’s wake and its endless elbow-bending aftermath, Mick collects those signatures and we wonder not so much if he’s sold his soul, but if he has the cash and wherewithal to buy it back.

The script was co-written by a real-estate developer, not that you can tell (cough cough). It’s a picture more wrapped up in ensemble and semi-seedy milieu than in anything that makes sense.

Trite and cliched redemption stories always go down easier with Irish stereotypes and toasts, right?

“If yer’gonna lie, lie for love. If yer’gonna steal, steal a heart. If yer’gonna cheat, cheat death.“

Piven dials down his “Entourage” cock-of-the-walk persona so much here that he gives us nothing to hang onto. Mick is presented as loud, still tough, still able to hold his liquor, still single and still pining for the still-single girl next door.

None of that plays. For the first time since he was John Cusack’s perpetual second-banana, Piven’s boring.

Every movie in this vein has to have “the boys” you grew up with. Jamie Kennedy plays one of those. There are old grudges about Little League brawls, sexual conquest contests, a blowsy tart roughly their age (Betsy Beutler) and dreams of a group vacay to “Tha SHORE.”

And at every juncture, with every scene (save for the tippling priest hearing confessions in a phone booth at the bar at the wake), “Last Call” grates. The script is tone deaf and the direction (Paolo Pilladi settling some ancient Italian grudge against the Irish, apparently) incompetent.

It’s the sort of picture where a supporting “villain” (Kresh Novakovic) lines up a pool shot, fully expecting the dunce behind the camera to notice he’s still rolling even though he’s lining up to poke the 6-ball with his cue, and keep that out of the frame

The dunce doesn’t.

“Pop” is fixing up the boat in the driveway for crab fishing, pulling huge chunks of fiberglass off a Swiss-cheesed junkyard prop. Alert viewers can see motor’s been pulled out of it, and that the boat in the water later looks nothing like this.

Not that anybody should be paying that much attention to this. The headaches “Call” induces are real, even if you don’t enjoy the libations it usually takes to earn them.

MPA Rating: R for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use

Cast: Jeremy Piven, Taryn Manning, Zack McGowan, Jack McGee, Jamie Kennedy, Cheri Oteri, Kresh Novakovic, Garry Pastore, Cathy Moriarty and Bruce Dern.

Credits: Directed by Paolo Pilladi, script by Paolo Pilladi and Greg Lingo. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

In a passing glance, I thought this was Spiderman on a Catamaran. Which makes sense in an onomatopoeia sort of way.

But no, this Texas cat in my Florida marina rocks Deadpool to scare off gulls, pigeons and other wrongdoers.

Yes, it is very “f—–g fog–” on the Florida Space Coast this am, as Mr. Pool would say.

Always thought of the Pool as more of a cutter-rigged ketch superhero myself. @vancityreynolds care to clarify?

This looks like a hoot. Coming very soon from IFC.

Yeah, Margot Robbie’s back. Oscar winner Viola Davis is here.

But Idris, Cena, Alice Braga, Joel Kinnamon, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi and Michael Rooker? UP grades, my dears. UPgrades.

This looks ultra violent and James Gunn funny/cool. Aug. 6.

“Boys vs. Girls” is an homage to those wacky/edgy kids summer camp comedies of yore, a “Meatballs” for a new generation…or rather it might be if it hadn’t been such a limp biscuit.

It’s a period piece send-up of such films with barely a laugh in it. “Edgy?” It’s “DeGrassi” with menstruation jokes.

It starts with a hint of promise, but never gets out of the gate.

The one chuckle I had was in the outtakes under the credits, and what do we say about outtakes in most comedies, kids? That they’re almost always a sign of comic desperation.

Camp Kindlewood has not-quite-thrived run as a boys-only July/girls-only August summer get-away for kids, and the older kids who act as camp counselors there. “Boys vs Girls” is about the summer of 1990, that first summer that they went “coed.”

Narrator Dale (Eric Osborne) is a high school kid and counselor who doesn’t know what “coed” means. Seriously. But he and BFF Ben (Jesse Camacho) and the other lads have to learn new rules, now that it’s not just “be our true selves” boys acting boyish time.

Camp director Roger (“Whose Line Is It?” comic Colin Mochrie) lays down the law.

“No more naked morning dips…No more peeing wherever you happen to be.”

Girl narrator Amber (Rachael Dagenais) is head female counselor, fated to spar with Dale and you-know-how-that-will-end.

“That’s Tiffany (Samantha Helt),” she tells us. “She thought penicillin was a fashion statement.”

There’s a surfer dude himbo counselor (Tim Dowler-Coltman) and a would-be B-boy (Romeo Carere) who can’t freestyle to save his Canadian whiteboy life.

On the other side of the gender divide we have the knife-carrying Goth-girl (Michala Brasseur) and Miss Eager to Please (Nia Roam) who swoons over the B-Boy.

The boys and girls first square off in “training” for that first coed summer, but things get really out of hand when the coed crews of campers show up, taking the “feud” to the next level.

Except things never come close to “out of hand.” The genders square off in a British Bulldog match, leaving the poor boys at a loss.

“They have GIRL parts! What do we grab onto?”

“The…gender NEUTRAL parts!”

The “pranks” are so lame you know it’s intentional, but none of Canada’s Bright and Pretty Young Things can play “irony” in a way that lands a laugh. Camacho, of TV’s “Insomnia” and “Locke & Key” tries for over-the-top and finds a dirty chuckle or big guy sight gag or two.

Everybody else? Hired for their nearly perfect looks and eagerness to spend extra hours in the makeup chair to complete that perfection.

The ’80s fashions and hairstyles are on the money. So? That matters as much as the imitation ’80s synth pop on the soundtrack (Pat Benatar was the only “original artist” I recognized).

Writer-director Michael Stasko didn’t have much luck with low-budget sci-fi (“The Control”), and sadly has no eye or ear for comedy either. The movie’s scattering of raunchy touches — camp “skits” on what “toxic” boys are really like and how ditzy girls get over their first “period — don’t have novelty or any comic bite.

The acting ranges from indifferent but cute to “At least he looks right at home, outdoors in all that makeup.”

The two veteran comics in the cast, Mochrie and “Kids in the Hall” alumnus Kevin Macdonald (as the drinking, pill-popping camp caretaker) have nothing funny to play. Until the outtakes.

And those outtakes? They hint at a picture that might have been aiming for an R-rated rudeness, an idea that was almost abandoned, but not quite. Every coarse and crude moment feels like a punch that Stasko pulled or that his cast didn’t have the stomach to deliver.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual humor, profanity

Cast: Rachel Dagenais, Eric Osborne, Michala Brasseur, Nia Roma, Romeo Carere, Jesse Camacho, Samantha Helt, Shaun Benson, Kevin McDonald, Colin Mochrie

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Stasko. A Dot.film release.

Running time:

The latest beta test of the Screenplay Cliches Bot is titled “The Oak Room,” a moody, talky, stunningly-dull and hilariously-trite “thriller” mostly set in a bar — a couple of bars — in remote, snowy Ontario.

Cliche #1? “Bar’s closed.” This overused situation and utterly worn-out line is trotted out more than once in this “I’ve got a story” tale.

Tell me you haven’t heard this before, ANY of these “I watched a couple of movies, time for me to write my own SCREENplay” Cliche Bot excretions.

“I don’t want any trouble.” “You’re not from around here, are you?” “Let’s see you talk your way out of THIS one!” “Don’t play games with me, kid!”

“I’m sorry, have I BORED you?”

Rhetorical question, in this case.

“Oak Room” is a bad “memory play” committed to film, practically a spoof of the genre, only too witless to make that claim. A parade of cliches uttered by “types,” it is tedium itself.

Guy in a hooded arctic jacket and face mask walks into a just-closed tavern. Bartender threatens him with a baseball bat. Guy takes the mask off and it’s “Stevie” (RJ Mitte) a “kid” who hasn’t been around these parts in years. The barking barkeep (Peter Outerbridge) unloads a dozen rounds of invective and threats straight out of the SCB (Screenplay Cliches Bot), about debts, a funeral missed, ashes stuffed in the old man’s old tackle box.

But Stevie’s “got a story.” And he tells it. It’s a flashback, and there are flashbacks within the flashback. It’s about another guy walking into another bar.

Stevie allegedly skipped town for college, but Mitte (“Breaking Bad”), who looks like Will Forte and talks out of the side of his mouth like Carl Spackler in “Caddyshack,” makes the guy seem “simple,” or at the very least “on the spectrum.”

He tells this wordy flashback involving another closed bar, another winter night and two guys (Martin Roach, Ari Millen) talking back and forth in a verbose scenario not unlike the one Stevie and Paul are acting out, one that includes its own flashback.

There’s a threat of violence lurking around the edges of both tales, but what the filmmakers were really interested in here isn’t action — it’s monologues in dimly-lit bars. Endless monologues. Childhood-on-the-farm memories. Barfly tells his “hitchhiking” story to the bartender.

And Stevie keeps adding details in that “I forgot” and “I messed up” because “I told you the ending first.”

Barkeep Paul speaks for himself and everybody who takes a gander at “The Oak Room” when he growls, “If I’m this bored with the ending, why should I wanna hear the BEGINNING?”

Director Cody Calahan (“Vicious Fun,” “Let Her Out”) does nothing to speed things along or give anything that happens any urgency. The actors never lift their characters, situations or dialogue out of the mud of a road traveled way too many times to count.

And, making his feature film screenwriting debut, Peter Genoway? Make him fill out any contracts on future films online. There needs to be a “Are you a bot?” box rider at the bottom of the page. Because this cut-and-paste cliche collection could have been written by a machine.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: RJ Mitte, Peter Outerbridge, Ari Millen, Martin Roach, Nicholas Campbell, and David Ferry

Credits: Directed by Cody Calahan, script by Peter Genoway. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:28

The mythic Japanese Namahage demon is a sort of twisted, monstrous “You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry, better not pout” character meant to give little children character and “good ethics” as they grow up.

In the corner of Japan where this practice lives on, men show up with horrific masks and costumes of straw and come bellowing into family events — often a tiny tyke’s birthday — shouting a child’s name and “Any naughty boys/girls here? Any CRYbabies around?”

Scares the daylights out of the kids, as the adults laugh and squeal and take video and photos. Seems pretty messed up to Western eyes, I have to say. But parents anywhere might get a little perverse pleasure out of it.

It’s just that in Tasuka’s case, that “character” and “good ethics” lesson never took. He’s still going around with the his Oga Peninsula Namahage Preservation Society, still scaring kids. But Tasuka (Taiga Nakano) is married, with a new baby Nagi. And he’s nobody’s idea of an adult — an inattentive screwup, tactless and clueless with his wife, Kotone (Riho Yoshioka). He laughs things off so much that she’s reached her “You’re not thinking at all” limit.

He’s off, leaving her with the baby one more time as he does his Namahage schtick with the boys, not picking up on her brittle dismay. And when she turns on the TV, there’s proof of his irresponsibility for the whole country to see. A live feature report on the tradition is interrupted by a drunken Namahage streaker. We don’t have to see the break-up or legal filing to know who was in the mask (and nothing else) or what followed.

“Any Crybabies Around?” is a dramedy about this hapless, childish can’t-hold-his-drink Peter Pan, picking up his story two years later when he realizes he wants to get back what he’s lost.

Writer-director Takuma Satô takes us on an odd odyssey from Tokyo back to Oga, through Japanese “apology culture” rituals, showing the limited value of that through wounds that cannot be healed with just words.

Nakano gives Tasuka this blank stare that perfectly suits a guy that bad things just happen to. He’s run over in company soccer games, avoids drinking and yet gets stuck taking care of a colleague who gets hammered and can’t get herself home.

That’s who he is — put upon, yanked about, attacked in a bar merely for spilling somebody’s drink.

Telling his story to that co-worker, leaving out the embarrassing bits, seems to steel his resolve. Nobody thinks of him as a grownup? He’ll go home, win back the ex and “be a father.” But things back in Oga? Complicated, his old pal Shiba (Kanchiro) warns. The ex is working as a “hostess” in a local “bottle service” club. One step above prostitute.

His understanding mother doesn’t give him much chance, and his brother is utterly dismissive. The ex? She just wants to know about child support and alimony.

And then there’s the older man (Toshirô Yanagiba) who has been trying to keep the Namahage tradition alive. He’d like to share his mountain of hate mail with dopey Tasuka.

“I’ll keep apologizing until I’m forgiven,” won’t get you far among these people.

“Any Crybabies Around?” (in Japanese with English subtitles) has a big, fat metaphor sitting right here for all to see, some good performances and local color. The tradition depicted is fascinating, funny and macabre.

But the film feels incomplete, a 110 minute movie that doesn’t quite finish its story even though it meanders through the middle acts to the payoff. The finale is poignant and packed with meaning, but feels unearned and frustrating. There’s a lot more to “growing up” and being responsible than just getting over being a “crybaby.”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, alcohol abuse

Cast: Taiga Nakano, Riho Yoshioka, Kanichiro 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Takuma Satô. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

“Better Days” is a searing indictment of bullying culture and China’s insanely intense college admissions system, all tucked into a sadly compelling romantic thriller.

The added-attention of an Oscar nomination gives a welcome boost to a movie much of the world missed in late 2019, but one well worth enduring and embracing.

“Enduring” because Derek Tsang’s film has a relentless quality, heartbreaking twists all the way through its multiple anti-climaxes ending. It almost outstays its welcome as it flips back and forth about how it resolves itself.

But “Better Days” is worth embracing because of its downtrodden leading characters, their compelling story and the brutality they endure from a Darwinian academic and social culture’s winner-takes-all system.

A Hong Kong production shot in Chunkging, it tells the story of Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu), a petite, mousy teen in a huge high school where every class drills kids for their senior exams, where every wall is adorned with slogans — “No Excuses,” “The Smart Always Find Ways” — where every teacher is a cheerleader and if that’s not enough, there are chanting pep rallies to reinforce cultural dogma.

“I will not fail my parents!” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) “I will not disappoint my teachers!”

Chen Nian is studious and smart, a walking endorsement of “meritocracy.” She is poor. Her single mom (Wu Yue) is locally infamous, hustling grey market goods, unsafe knock offs and the like.

“When you graduate from college (after excelling on the admissions exam) we’ll escape from this hellhole.”

Pressure? A little.

But then a classmate hurls herself off a balcony in front of everybody. As the other kids gawk and take cellphone shots, Chen Nian weeps and drapes her jacket over the body. They were deskmates. And when we see the mountain of books piled in front of each of them on that desk, we understand.

Except that’s not the whole picture. There’s a mean girl posse led by Wei Lai (Zhour Ye). And from the relentless way they go after Chen Nian after she meets with the cops, we understand the hell that these kids endure, not just from the system but from each other.

The bullying of Nian quickly escalates into assault, but the young cop (Yin Fang) who interrogated her after her deskmate’s death proves to be well-intentioned and ineffectual. Mean girls have parents and minions who back them to the hilt, at least in the movies.

It’s when Chen Nian’s compassion shows itself again that she finds a protector. She calls the cops when she sees a boy being beaten, and is slapped around herself for her trouble. Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee) is nothing if not gallant. He will repay her. A brittle relationship forms between the teen punk living on his own and neglected Nian (Mom has to go on the lam).

“Do you like me?” he wants to know.

“What is there to like?”

We watch Nian suffer by day but get a break from the after-school assaults after this connection is forged. But something about the tough guy should be a warning. His “I always get even in the end” means that the Mean Girl and her Posse wars will only get worse.

Actor turned director Tsang — he did “Soulmates” — fleshes out Jiu Yuexi’s novel with spirited montages of the pressure-cooker school and the grim routines of the life of students there. Who has time to be bullied or do the bullying?

But that’s the way of it, parents, teachers and cops agree. “You’re either a bully, or you’re bullied.”

Even the death of a classmate faces a circumscribed investigation, because the kids “can’t spare more time. Exams are coming.” A giant digital clock at school counts down the days. Parents show up, drop to their knees and beg teachers, and when that fails, they shriek at their kids and whale on them in front of the entire school.

With every hope of social mobility riding on the Chinese ACT/SAT, everyone feels the strain.

Two of China’s brightest young stars set off sparks in this bullying variation of the French classic “Breathless,” with its bad boy, the “good” girl, violence, love and eventually crime entering the story.

As I mentioned above, the third act tends to go on and on, twisting and twisting in on itself, undercutting the flashback structure (A teacher — Chen Nian? — looks back on 2011.) or making that something of a teen-fantasy-about-our-future interpretation.

“Better Days” may open with a disclaimer about this “worldwide” problem, which bullying is in our social media age. But as savage as that is here, it’s the unbearable pressure of “the system” that sticks with you. Social strata as grimly defined as Dickensian England and entire families living or dying by how the smartest kid does in these soul-crushing tests make “The Chinese Way” to global success not one many would be willing to emulate.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, smoking

Cast: Zhou Dongyu, Jackson Yee, Yin Fang, Zhou Ye, Wu Yue and Huang Jue

Credits: Directed by Derek Tsang, script by Wing-Sum Lam, Yimeng Xu, Yuan Li and Nan Chen, based on a novel by Jiu Yuexi. A Well Go release.

Running time: 2:15

If Hollywood is going to give screenwriting Oscar nominations to “Borat” movies, brace yourself for pranks, pranks and more pranks pictures.

“Bad Trip” is more at the “Bad Grandpa” with Johnny Knoxville end of the practical joke pictures spectrum. A little edge, a few confrontations with angry rural America, waaaay too many bodily function/bodily fluid gross-out gags.

There are a few scattered laughs, but the big take-away from this how easy it is to make Tiffany Haddish a gangsta nobody recognizes, and how how EVERYbody is scared of Tiffany Haddish when she goes gangsta.

The “plot” is just two minimum wage drones (Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery) who take a road trip in a pink Crown Vic from suburban Tampa to New York.

Chris is chasing high school crush (Michaela Conlin) to an art opening there, and they have a few days. So why not take the Blue Highways there?

But that Crown Vic with the “Bad Bitch” vanity plates and “Bad Bitch” scrawled across the rear window? It belongs to Trina (Haddish), the inmate/thug sister of Bud (Howery). And when she escapes prison, she “ain’t tryin’ to KILL nobody.” Only she is. And she keeps showing their pictures and pix of the car in diners up and down the Eastern seaboard, shocking one and all with her loud threats and imprecations of violence.

Haddish, in corn rows, neck tattoos and coveralls, is recognizable. But nobody does. She’s that frightening. Even when she’s asking random strangers — including a cop — “You want a baby mama?”

She storms into Bud’s phone repair shop in her debut scene, bulls her way behind the counter and empties the register, warning “real” costumers “You didn’t see NOTHING” and “I REMEMBER faces!”

They believe her.

Andre is the headliner here, staging flip outs, gas station “accidents,” an “I met a GIRL” production number utterly disrupting a mall, and a zoo enclosure guy-in-a-gorilla-suit rape gag.

Oh my.

He gets kicked in the mall, enrages people left and right in a country music bar, gets cussed on golf courses and in diners, and leaves a lot more folks shocked, dismayed and concerned than furious.

Lucky him.

There’s a hint of America’s shared humanity (Black folks, and some white folks try to “help”), and bigger doses of the country’s racial divide. But the “poke the bear” bits fall well short of Sacha Baron Cohen’s most “out there” antics. And while there are scenes which seem realistic, too many others leave you questioning, “Ok, I KNOW those folks see the cameras on that bus/capturing that mall dance number,” etc.

Howery is basically his straight man for much of this. Well, save for the faked (editing suggests the “bystanders” knew this was fakery) car crash and the Chinese finger-trapped penis gag.

And then there’s the pals’ recreation (in front of real people at a charity reception) of “White Chicks,” made up and dressed up like Shawn and Marlon Wayans in that black-men-as-white-women comedy, remembering to “think white thoughts” and starting conversations with the unsuspecting patrons of this gala with “I’m going to see Megyn Kelly give a TED Talk later.”

Yes there are laughs, but a lot more cringes without giggles.

But every time things go wrong, lame or too gross, here’s Haddish stealing a police car by TEARING THE DOOR off, crashing (literally) an art opening and scaring Elderly White America into eight more years of voting Republican.

MPA Rating: R (Pervasive Language|Drug Use|Crude Sexual Content|Some Graphic Nudity)

Cast: Eric Andre, Tiffany Haddish, Lil Rel Howery, Michaela Conlin

Credits: Directed by Kitao Sakurai, script by Dan Curry, Eric André, Kitao Sakurai. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

The first names that come to mind when you hear the literary term “magical realism” are South American, the second Bengali, and so on down the line.

But Iranian actress/author Shahrnoush Parsipour took her shot at this blend of harsh reality coped with through fantasy with “Women Without Men,” a look back at the crucial crisis of her country’s recent history — the 1953 British-backed and CIA-plotted coup that overthrew a nascent and fractious Persian democracy and set the stage for a decades of troubles to come.

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari turned that into a gorgeous, meditative and poetic film in 2009, a tale of four women who live through the crisis, coping and denying, protesting and helplessly caught up in the communist rallies and conservative religious zealotry that became the most potent counter and eventual overthrow of that regime decades later.

Arita Shahrzad is Farrokhlagha, unhappily-married to an army officer, her life shaken up by the return of an old lover (Bijan Daneshmand) who fled during earlier British rule. His return has her dreaming of starting over, buying an orchard and experiencing love in her late 40s.

Munis (Shabnam Toloui) is glued to her radio, increasingly upset by the early British blockade that was designed to bring down the government. She may wear black and be pushing 30 and unmarried, but she would be wholly radicalized if she weren’t under the thumb of her tyrannical fundamentalist brother Amir Khan (Essa Zahir) who is determined that she marry. We meet her as she’s giving serious thought to giving in to despair and contemplating suicide.

Her friend Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni) is Amir Khan’s kind of woman. She longs to marry him, but listening to Munis’ alarm at the political situation and her personal enslavement is enough to give the devout Faezeh pause.

And most hopeless of all is Zarin (Orsolya Tóth). She is trapped, the most in-demand prostitute at a Tehran brothel. Haunted and emaciated, she despairs of ever escaping, of ever being truly “clean.”

“Women Without Men” follows each down her own path, into the coffee shops where politics and philosophy is bickered over in the middle of a coup.

“Albert Camus was WRONG!”

Radios crackle with alarming news updates, marches lead to rallies and rallies lead to crackdowns. And in voice-over narration, we hear characters’ inner musings and see their fantastical dreams. Musin finally gets to attend a rally.

“I was there not to watch, but to see!”

Image after image in this immaculately-composed picture stands out — misty groves at dusk and gardens of flowers, long walks down stark, empty roads, a death that isn’t really a death — or is it followed by a haunting?

The most chilling moment has to be Zarin’s shamed trip to the communal baths, women and their children unaware of her profession, helpful and supportive. But she would prefer to scrub her skin raw by herself, tormented by her lot in life.

Scenes like that remind us that there’s no way this depiction of pre-lapsarian Iran could have been filmed there. The explosive politics, the unflattering depiction of zealots and the sex and nudity, recreating a more liberal era before the Shah and the Army, before the mullahs ran things, had to be recreated in Casablanca.

For all the navel gazing, dreams and poetic interludes, “Women Without Men” is a film that’s aging well, a work of art that sends the same messages a dozen years after its creation — that whatever strife the men in charge of this troubled land stir up, it is the women who suffer and silently obsess over what the men leave out or take away.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Orsolya Tóth, Shabnam Toloui, Pegah Ferydoni, Arita Shahrzad

Credits: Scripted and directed by Shirin Neshat, Shoja Azari, based on the novel by Shahrnoush Parsipour. An Indiepix/Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:39