Review: The Stoning of Soraya M.

The biggest narrative challenge facing the “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is in the overcoming of its own title. With the awful outcome inevitable, co-writer/director Cyrus Nowrasteh is forced to hold our attention through means other than a curiosity over how things will end. Replacing this with a gut-wrenching dread awaiting the final act won’t suffice — not for two hours, anyway. This leaves a single, narrow and challenging avenue; the summoning of a rare kind of storytelling invention, the kind where the audience knows full well what’s coming but still hopes against hope some cinematic magic will occur to alter the unalterable.

In an impressive feat of direction Nowrasteh accomplishes this, making “Soraya” much more than a film of the political moment or a position paper on the Middle East. In a current events’ vacuum, maybe even set on another planet, the story would work without the benefit of allegory. This is a universal, human story, after all, but not the story of a victim, but of a woman’s remarkable courage and determination to free the truth. This woman is Zahra (Shohreh Aghdashloo), and yesterday her niece Soraya M. (Mozhan Marnò), was buried alive up to her chest and stoned to death.

Based on Freidoune Sahebjam’s non-fiction novel of the same name, “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” takes place in 1986, seven years after Iran’s Islamic revolution. Due to car trouble, Freidoune (James Caviezel), a French-Iranian journalist, finds himself stranded in a remote Iranian village. He had hoped the downtime would allow him to quietly sip tea in a cafe and catch up on some work, but Zahra won’t leave him alone. Discreetly, she flitters about, following, quietly hoping to catch his eye, demanding his attention. The villagers warn Freidoune that Zahra’s crazy, not all there, but a reporter’s instinct wins out and soon he finds himself in her courtyard listening to a very real horror story. From here, in flashbacks, we meet Soraya M. and watch with ever-increasing dread as terrible men, and even some women, move events against her trumping up false charges of adultery.

Soraya’s “sin” is innocence, an inability to recognize events for what they are. She’s a well drawn character whose strength and spirit we admire even as we shake our heads at the naivete which plays such a large part in her demise. She simply can’t fathom the defiance of her husband, Ali, could lead to anything worse than a beating, which she’s willing to take because the divorce he wants in order to marry a much younger woman means no support for Soraya and her children.

Zahra’s even more fascinating, a clever and wise woman incapable of dishonestly. Though unafraid to speak her mind in a society where such characteristics only mean trouble, Aghdashloo infuses Zahra with such an unspoken dignity and authority that this helps to make perfect sense of her survival. Any act of silencing her would be an admission that she’s right. At the same time, Zahra’s in a harrowing position of her own. Ever watchful, she not only understands that gears are in motion, but where they could lead. But like something out of a nightmare, she can’t stop what’s happening or convince her beloved niece to act until it’s too late.

The three central performances are flawless, the sense of time and place impeccable, and the score beautifully evocative. The pace does slow in spots and the final button on Ali’s relationship with the younger woman was a little too tidy in the irony department for my taste, but the central sequence, the stoning, is unforgettable. Explicit, unflinching and emotionally shattering, it’s also conceived, choreographed and shot like an accomplished short film with a three-act structure and devastating character moments all its own.

Because of the violence, setting, and presence of Caviezel, comparisons to “The Passion of the Christ” are inevitable, but these are two very different films. “The Passion” was about helping the faithful to better understand the suffering of our Lord. “Soraya” isn’t about suffering. Instead it serves as a compassionate and at times visceral reminder that monsters, shielded by monstrous laws, international indifference and those selfishly comforted by the stability of dictators, walk among us; that even today, societies exist where an ideological poison breeds men capable of such wicked and inhuman acts.

But on the flip side, Nowrasteh does something equally important, does something not a single one of these dozen or so anti-war films has dared: he puts a real, human and accessible face on the people of the Middle East. Leftist bigots refuse to do this. It works in opposition to their depraved need to embarrass Bush and America by abandoning millions of Middle Eastern and Muslim innocents to terrorists and death squads. Certainly Nowrasteh shines a light on monsters, but he also sees Soraya and Zahra and Freidoune and children and two somewhat sympathetic but weak and conflicted men caught in a tide of something evil and impossible. “Soraya” is a first in many years, a film that introduces us to the good people of this region and reminds us of our common humanity.

Those images of brave Iranians demanding self-determination currently playing across our television screens will undoubtedly add an emotional resonance to “Soraya” when it opens this Friday, but there’s no expiration date on the broader themes at play here. There will always be evil and there will always be a need to point to it and call it by name.