A strong wind shakes the tree branches. A man’s hands turn the pages of a book; a woman’s hands wash a plate, make a bed, scrub a bathtub; the arms of a figure swallowed by waves reach out for help. The defiant gaze of a famous actress appears. Drawing on post-revolution Iranian films and a personal archive of floral imagery, Maryam Tafakory weaves a vengeful fable, linking psychiatry to the policing of female desire, in which the heroine, Daria, is condemned to disappearance for having written a lesbian love story. She exhumes scenes of sedated wives taking medication, sometimes hiding it from their violent husbands, and intertwines these with exquisite floral illuminations from ancient pharmacopoeias and macro shots of carnivorous plants. Remedy, drug, poison—the narrative unfolds various uses of flowers through dark poetic prescriptions: “medicine to induce forgetting”, “plant to ease the pain of loving the one you mustn’t”, “that which can both heal and kill”… The whispered echoes of these phrases accompany the film’s enigmatic narrative (voiced by the filmmaker herself), in which the tragedy gradually merges with that of the heroine in the novel, named “Blue”. Blue shrouds the film in her cryptic presence, bathing it in bluish light, while layered images of blossoming bouquets bloom across the screen. Maryam Tafakory imagines a secret language of flowers, casting them as a kind of pharmakon, and makes Daria’s flowers a possible antidote to male oppression—if only for the duration of this tale of survival and resistance that runs counter to dominant representations. The final line, spoken by a bedridden woman, becomes a call for unity, a longing for liberation through disappearance: “I wish I were Daria (the sea, in Farsi)”.
Louise Martin Papasian