Made without an ounce of subtext, and didactic by anyone's standards, Iranian director Tahmineh Milani's Two Women is nevertheless a powerful and instructive feminist tract that commands respect outside the usual aesthetic criteria. Piercingly direct in a way that may surprise Western viewers, the film presents a clear-eyed examination of a woman's fate in contemporary Iran and how it's steadfastly determined by tradition and social class. In the title roles, Marila Zare'i and Niki Karimi are more types than actual characters, a pair of inseparable college friends with similar interests and temperaments whose lives head down radically divergent paths. In the years since they met at Tehran University in the early '80s, the middle-class Zare'i has enjoyed a happy marriage and a successful career in architecture, while Karimi, an equally gifted student from a forbidding country home, has faced oppression and servitude. Through extensive flashbacks, Milani reveals how Karimi's promising future was quashed by three men—her father, her arranged husband, and a stalker—intent on dictating their will upon her. Controversial in its native country, where the script took seven years to gain approval from government censors, Two Women was also a major box-office success, a sign that audiences were receptive to its strong rejection of fundamentalist values. If Milani's staging seems clumsy and flat at times, it's important to note that the depiction of women on screen is severely regulated; ironically, the restrictions placed on appearance and behavior are precisely those she seeks to combat. Two Women may have limitations as art, but a catalyst for social change, it's bold and illuminating.