The
Fifth Reaction, directed by Tahmineh Milani, is a continuation
of her previous The Hidden Half (2001). The film begins
with a Joy Luck Club (1993) motif. Five well-educated women,
former classmates at school, are lunching at a fine restaurant,
sharing the joyful and unlucky experiences of their lives;
the former involve work, the latter refer to men. As the
film proceeds, two women face problems. The first problem
emerges during lunch. The husband of one woman, who enters
the restaurant with his twenty-year-old secretary, soon
realizes that his wife is present. He goes over to her
table and launches a vitriolic tirade about the impropriety
of women dining out when they should be at home, attending
to domestic responsibilities. The husband orders his wife
to go home, but she objects. The husband's voice is so
loud that the restaurant manager comes over to ask him
to pipe down, but soon he must use force to restrain the
overexcited husband. The wife then resolves to teach him
a lesson, Lysistrata style. She goes home, puts some of
her things in a bag, and lives elsewhere until her husband
comes to his senses and apologizes. Her strategy works,
and in two weeks she is back home and the owner of a new
automobile. The second problem occupies most of the rest
of the film. Fereshteh (played by Niki Karimi), an underpaid
schoolteacher, has recently become a widow, leaving fatherless
her two sons, aged seven and nine. After lunch, she returns
to the home of her father-in-law, Haj Safdar (played by
Jamshid Hashempour), whom she believes to be fair and just,
but he instead invokes an ancient custody tradition, contrary
to current Iranian law, that predates the existence of
working women. He orders her to move back to her father's
home, leaving the children behind with him while giving
Fereshteh visitation rights. As a widow, she no longer
has any legal ties with the father-in-law, so he is asserting
the right to determine who will live in his house, believing
that the two children will be better off living with someone
rich, though he has no wife to serve as mother for the
boys. Fereshteh, however, pleads that the boys need a mother
regardless of her income level. Haj Safdar then offers
a compromise: She can stay in the house with the two sons "on
one condition," namely, that she will marry his remaining
son, Majid. Fereshteh refuses to do so, moves out, and
she sees the boys as often as she can. One day, she learns
that the boys will be vacationing at some distance from
Tehran, and she fears that the boys may soon be sent to
live with their aunt in Singapore, permanently out of her
reach. Accordingly, she consults with her four lunchmates,
who come up with a solution: She is to fly to Dubai and
get a job with the aid of a friend of one of the five women.
However, Haj Safdar suspects that she is about to escape,
so he tails her as she goes to the airport in her friend's
car. To avoid a confrontation at the airport, Fereshteh
then decides that she must evade him by leaving the country
instead by boat. Fereshteh heads for the Persian Gulf,
living in houses of friends along the way, but Haj Safdar
remains in hot pursuit. When he finally catches up with
her at a port city, he has her thrown in jail. Fereshteh's
female friend at the port lectures Haj Safdar on the need
of children for their mother, and Haj Safdar appears contrite.
He goes into the jail cell and offers to drop the charges "on
one condition." The movie then ends without telling
filmviewers about that condition. The Fifth Reaction identifies
a host of customs and government regulations that favor
men over women in Iran, all to the detriment of the best
interests of children as well as women, and thus is a plea
for gender equality. However, some Iranians may find the
film amusing because the men portrayed are too extreme
to be credible characters. MH
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