The Stoning of Soraya M. (Nowrasteh, 2008)IMDB LinkThe difference sometimes between a critic and an average viewer is that critics sometimes tolerate less. Fortunately or unfortunately, I now fall in the former. “The Stoning of Soraya M” has a metacritic of 50, but the user score is 9.3. Almost similar in Rottentomatoes, the critics giving it 54% while the users giving it 90%.
Why the difference? I’ll venture that average viewers love the film for its brutal, melodramatic deception of stoning. Hardcore film viewers, like me, don’t buy into it easily. There is no shade of grey, not even a slightly blur of it, everything is deep black and stark white, and it’s message is driven home using a 40 inch jackhammer.
The story is based on a book on “true” story of a stoning of a woman (Mozhan Marnò) in the early 80s (during the chaotic years of the post Iranian revolution). I put the true part in quotations because the book was written by a Iranian-French journalist (played by James “Jesus Christ” Caviezel) that heard the story from the woman’s aunt (Hollywood’s most famous Iranian actress, Shohreh Aghdashloo) when he was passing through a village. Hearing it from one source, that also being an aunt of the victim, already slants the story heavily, but then written by a journalist that was the son of an ambassador during Shah’s regime means that it is even more slanted.
That is not to say I’m defending stoning of women, which is why viewers generally can’t dislike it. It seems for most viewers if they dislike a movie like this, they assume they are supporting the act. It is a very interesting subject, but I’m more interested in what drives normal people to such acts. In the film, there really isn’t “normal” people. Soraya herself is a gorgeous, sweet, angel of a woman, the wife of a horrible husband. The husband beats her, insults her, teaches his sons to be against her, wants to divorce her without giving her any financial help to raise her daughters, goes to prostitutes, wants to marry a 14 year old, and comes up with a plot to incite the village to stone her just so he gets rid of her. The other men involved are a mullah who used to be a prisoner and is another vile creature, the mayor of the village who has some doubts but goes with it anyway, and so on.
Aside from the brutality of the stoning sequence, nothing else feels authentic. You watch the films of Majid Majidi or Bahman Ghobadi, and you can see their almost perfect depictions of village life. Director Cyrus Nowrasteh doesn’t nearly have the talent, having every character feel out of place in the movie.
“The Stoning of Soraya M.” will be enjoyed by a lot of people, but it is a bad film. A better film would have had good people do bad things. Having bad people do bad things is no harder than making a Steven Seagal film.
2/5
