Every week Nicotina brings us an unforgettable female character from the movies. A girl you just can’t miss. This week Nicotina suggest you get to know Simin.
The character of the wife Simin played by Fatemeh Motamed Aria’s in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1993 Iranian farce The Actor bests the hysterical pitch of the maddest of Almodavar’s women. The story about a woman’s obsessive response to the social expectation of having a child turns this rather short film into a beguiling take on gender roles, madness and love. What marks this film as different from some of Almodavar’s forays into women on the verge of a nervous breakdown is that the camera is just as animatedly carnivalesque as the character of the wife is. A camera that’s so counter intuitive and confounding that it visually suggests that the deaf-mute Gypsy girl Simin has found to mother a child with her husband, the chaplinesque comedian, is in fact married to Simin and is having her child. A character so married to the camera in her madness that it’s not surprising the censors passed this.