After Leila's Brothers — a film that transformed a story of family inheritance into a total metaphor for the Iranian state and was received in Tehran accordingly, meaning: banned — Roustaee returns to the Croisette with a story that at first glance feels narrower, quieter, more earthbound. A nurse, a widow, a teenage son, a new man, an engagement, a tragedy, a search for justice. On the surface — almost a television template. But Roustaee once again makes from a private case an X-ray of the entire system. And the image it reveals is merciless.

Parvin (Parizad Izzadyar — the finest Iranian actress of her generation, playing here, it seems, with every cell of her body) is a woman who has learned to live under conditions of perpetual deficit: of money, of time, of sympathy, of allies. She works double nursing shifts; she is a widow; she is the mother of a teenager she does not understand and whom the system has already begun to grind down — slowly, imperceptibly, like millstones that are always turning, inaudible until you have fallen between them. And then a man appears — the possibility of starting again. Roustaee shows us this "starting again" with such tenderness that the subsequent ruin is physically painful.

The engagement scene — central both in screen time and in thematic weight — is shot in the tradition of Iranian restraint. Everything is correct, everything is beautiful, tea has been poured, the table has been laid, the relatives are smiling — and it is precisely this decorative normality, this parade of propriety, that makes the subsequent explosion (literal and metaphorical) unbearable. Roustaee understands what Chekhov and Fassbinder understood: the most terrible violence does not raise its voice.

A separate, entirely self-contained film exists inside Woman and Child — the story of the son. Adolescent Arman moves through the screen like an alien speaking a language his mother does not know and will not have time to learn: not because she is a bad mother, but because between their generations lies a chasm of historical proportions — the Iranian revolution, war, repression. They live in the same apartment and cannot hear each other. Roustaee passes no moral judgment: simply two people who love each other speaking different languages.

The film's central theme — and it must be named plainly — is not the tragedy of the engagement and not the story of revenge. It is invisibility. The invisibility of a woman inside a system that pretends to see her (laws, rights, procedures) but is in practice arranged so that she cannot win a case, receive compensation, or obtain any answer without humiliating herself and begging help from people who owe her nothing. Parvin is not a victim in the conventional sense: she is fierce, intelligent, and sometimes wrong.

If one is to speak of what it means to live in Iran here and now — not in prison, not underground, but in the most ordinary, everyday, peaceable hell of normal life — then Roustaee describes it more precisely and in greater detail than anyone else. The injustice he depicts has no need of executioners. It is self-sufficient.