Unit 6 - Blog Query - Three scenes from Zinat

Blog: Analyze at least three different specific scenes that you found particularly important or revealing. Why are they significant and what do they reveal? Were there any aspects of those scenes or the film as a whole that you found confusing or unclear? If you had to rewrite the ending, and in particular the role of Zinat’s husband, how might you change it?

1. The early scene, in the clinic, where Zinat is intimidated into serving the man ahead of the women who came before him. Doing it is arguably 1) required, because he is a man, but 2) an unchaste behavior, as she must give him an injection, perhaps in the buttocks. The women in the waiting room, which includes her future mother-in-law are either disgusted or titillated. The future mother-in-law leaves in anger.
   
2. The scene where the son tells his mother, against her obvious will, that if she wants him married, and every good Iranian mother wants her son married -- it is Zinat or nobody. I think that is a much more POWERFUL act on his part than most watching understand. He has more spine than is obvious and is willing, at least in part, to turn against tradition.
   
3. The scene where the government official comes to Zinat’s house to try to force her father into allowing her to work. Her father is so adamant in his resistance that he calls the official’s bluff and tells him to take him to jail. He says he will repay the government. Having a “proper” married daughter is very important in thatulture. He even later beats her in his frustration, wanting so badly for her to be a happy married woman in the traditional model. (You get the sense that he might even, like the US Army Did with the city of Hue in the Vietnam War), destroy Zinat to save her.)

I would NOT change the role of Zinat’s husband. He was a good man struggling with his own concepts of propriety and right and wrong, and it played out beautifully – with him joining Zinat at the end, turning his back on his mother and tradition.