Utopia

The film is about five women working in a brothel and the man who runs them. He keeps control by setting them against each other; because none of them trusts another, standing up to him together never becomes possible. The account shows how an arrangement that turns desire into a line of trade actually works, and it shows it through individual people. The director keeps the scenes long and repetitive; what is at stake here is not events moving forward but one day resembling the next exactly. Each of the women is there for a reason of her own, and the film does not reduce those reasons to a single story. Because the dividing works, none of them treats another’s situation as her own concern. Sohrab Shahid-Saless’s hundred and eighty seven minute film was completed in 1983.