About Elly

About Elly came out in 2009 and was set in Iran. It is about a group of friends going to the beach for a trip and Elly was invited along because she was the schoolteacher of Sepideh’s young daughter. Sepideh invited Elly along to try and get her with her friend, Ahmad, who was visiting from Germany. The next day Elly was set to leave to go back home but Sepideh tried to get her to stay and left to go to town without her. During that time one of the younger children had gone into the sea on his own and Elly had gone to save him. When this scene was first introduced, and throughout the rest of the film, they keep the viewer wondering if she did die in the sea when she was trying to save the boy or if she did end up walking to the bus station to leave. The part where the two other children went to get the men to go and save the boy drowning in the water was the first example of the hierarchy that men have over women that caught my attention. At that time in the movie, it almost portrays Elly as weak because we do not know if she left to go to the bus station or if she went in and tried to save the boy and was unsuccessful. Throughout the film you can see the group of friends start to lose their composure because they do not know what had happened to Elly, they also start to feel bad because they did not know her all that well. The men start to get angry with the women and the children because they are stressed out about the situation, but you do not see the women getting angry with one another or their husbands and children. This stuck out to me because it shows that the men feel as if they must fix every situation they are in and become angry with everyone who is around them when things do not go their way. I think this is a good way to show the power that they have in everyday life because they feel like they have to be at the head of this investigation and since they can not come up with anything, they start to feel hopeless. This feeling can lead them to being angry and we can see in the film that they start to blame the females for what had happened to them. It starts off when Shohreh left Elly in charge to watch the children while she went to the store and she was blamed for everything that had happened because she did stay and watch the children herself. Then Sepideh was being blamed by her husband for even inviting Elly in the first place because she did not know that much about her. Sepdideh’s husband gets frustrated with her and decides that he needs to get physical with her, but it was her fault that led him to do it. I noticed this a lot throughout the movie that the girls would be blamed for things even if they had no direct impact to what had happened. This movie also helps to see that people in Iran live the same everyday life as us here, even if their world does not look the same as ours. It helps the viewer to see Iran in a less militarized way, while also showing who holds the power in relationships between men and women in Iran.