What does a respectable, God-fearing husband do when he falls for another woman? Shohar-e Ahoo Khanom, Davoud Molapoor's 1968 drama, watches him try to answer that question, and the film is streaming on K-Time.
What is Shohar-e Ahoo khanom about?
The husband of the title is a middle-aged man of faith with a wife, children and a settled place in his community. Then he meets Homa, a widow, and everything he has built starts to feel like a cage. He does not give in easily. Torn between his duties at home and a desire he cannot pray away, he wrestles with himself for much of the film, and the struggle plays out not in dramatic confrontations but in the slow erosion of his standing, his money and his household. Ahoo Khanom, the wife, is the quiet centre of that household, the person whose patience is tested the longest. The film keeps both women in view, the one who represents everything the man already has and the one who represents what he thinks he wants, and lets his indecision do the damage.
About the cast
Mehri Vadadian heads the cast, with Adile Eshragh, Hossein Eshragh, Farrokhlagha Houshmand, Akbar Meshkin and Giti Forouhar completing the principal ensemble. It is a company of stage-trained and character performers rather than matinee stars, which suits a story told at the scale of a single household and its neighbours.
Context & significance
Shohar-e Ahoo Khanom was released in 1968, well before the Iranian new wave had become a recognised movement, and it sits in the tradition of serious domestic melodrama that gave that movement some of its footing. Its subject, a devout man undone by a love he cannot reconcile with his obligations, is a staple of Persian storytelling, but the film treats it as a social portrait as much as a romance: reputation, piety and money are all shown as things that can be lost together. Molapoor directs at a measured pace across the film's 87 minutes, keeping the drama inside rooms and courtyards and allowing the two women, the wife and the widow, to carry as much of the story as the man between them.
Watching Shohar-e Ahoo khanom on Ktime
Shohar-e Ahoo Khanom plays on K-Time in the original Persian. A free K-Time account login is all that is needed to watch; this page is open to read, and the service's Farsi interface is built with the Iranian diaspora in mind.