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LGBT Film Festival — Mask over mask
Sunday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. — Gender disguise as an attempt for greater freedom in ‘Unveiled’
By Rob Spencer
We are never quite sure at what moment she will realize — accept? — he is actually a she.
In a plane’s bathroom after leaving Iranian airspace, Fariba Tabrizi (Jasmin Tabatabai) removes her black scarf and lights up a cigarette in “Unveiled.” She has fled Iran because she refuses to renounce her lesbianism. Soon trapped again in barracks full of foreign detainees at the German airport, she befriends a fellow Iranian named Siamak (Navíd Akhavan), a man in a similar situation.
He asks Fariba to write letters to his parents if something should happen to him. Upon learning that his brother has been executed for an unnamed crime Siamak committed, Siamak kills himself.
Donning the man’s glasses and wardrobe, Fariba easily slips by the incurious eyes of immigration.
Allowed access to only one German county, Fariba finds grueling work and shoddy lodging among migrant workers and xenophobic small-town Germans. Fearing deportation, she continues to assume the guise and gender of Siamak. Anna (Anneke Kim Sarnau), one of Siamak’s co-workers at the cabbage processing plant, takes an interest in “him.”
She gently gains Siamak’s trust, and we are never quite sure at what moment she will realize — accept? — he is actually a she.
The film gives us moments that seem like they could be revelations, but Anna’s conscious mind might not be ready to understand what the stroking of Siamak’s hands and neck has been telling her subconscious for some time.
There is sadness and frustration in Fariba that probably has less to do with assuming Siamak’s gender and more to do with the necessity of having to deceive for self-preservation and human kindness.
In “Unveiled,” forms of deception that inevitably spring from transformation lead to reconciliation between Fariba’s two halves. The stories each half tells are both truthful, and, really, the same story.
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