Simple but bluntly effective, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” places a barbaric tradition squarely at the center of its story.
If the prospect of watching a woman buried waist-deep in sand and pelted with rocks until she dies sounds impossible to sit through, you might think hard about subjecting yourself to this film. It’s a brutal experience, made with considerable outrage about its subject.
What makes the stoning even more horrifying is its legality. That’s the point of this movie, which is based on a book by French journalist Freidoune Sahebjam — a book subtitled “A True Story,” though it was evidently a novel.
The story is framed in flashback: A journalist (James Caviezel) is held over in a small Iranian town while his car is fixed. A woman (Shoreh Aghdashloo, from “House of Sand and Fog”) takes him aside and tells him the story we are about to see.
She describes the fate of her niece, a young woman named Soraya (L.A. actress Mozhan Marno). When Soraya’s ambitious husband wants out of the marriage, he trumps up evidence against Soraya and has her convicted of adultery, or at least the appearance of something improper. (I would say “spoiler alert” here, if the movie’s ending weren’t contained in its title.)
The utter innocence of Soraya is actually one of the film’s easier shortcuts to audience sympathy. What if she had been guilty of adultery? Wouldn’t the horror of her publicly approved torture be just as unacceptable?
“Justice” is swift, and much less debated here than in, say, the Hollywood classic about lynching, “The Ox-Bow Incident.” Soraya is given an afternoon to settle her affairs and then she is buried to her waist in the middle of the main street.
Stones are thrown by an enthusiastic crowd of men, including her father, husband and sons. The religious zeal they express (God is frequently invoked as rocks fly from hands) seals their sense of righteousness.
Don’t look for nuance here. This is a nightmare, bloodily told. Outside the saga of Soraya herself, notably in the Caviezel character’s somewhat absurd escape from the village, the movie is flat.
Director Cyrus Nowrasteh, an Iranian-American, clearly wants to inflame the public, and likely he will. (The movie is set in 1986, when the true basis for the novel apparently happened, but it leaves you understandably livid that there are still places where such things can, and do, happen.)
The film can’t help but resonate with the recent riots in Iran, where the fraudulent election has finally brought people out in the streets to protest the 30-year-old Islamic regime.
Protests didn’t come in time to save the Sorayas around the world, but if this movie helps create awareness, it will serve its artless function.
“The Stoning of Soraya M.”
In a small Iranian village in 1986, a young woman is sentenced to public stoning on trumped-up adultery charges — a situation rendered in brutal, artless detail. This movie exists to bring a barbaric reality to light, and in that sense it undeniably succeeds. (In Persian, with English subtitles.)
Rated: R for violence
Showing: Seven Gables
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