Film Today

We watched a film today in our Literary Interpretation class, though I unfortunately didn't catch the title of it. After searching though, I found it is called "A Tale of Two Women," though the plot certainly focuses on one more than the other. Fereshteh and Roya are arguably the two women in question, though as the movie progresses, one wonders if the two women the film's title talks about are really just the sad transformation of Fereshteh into a woman completely different than the one we were introduced to in the beginning.
The movie starts off in the present (or, 1999, when the film was released) as we are presented with a frantic phone call from a woman named Fereshteh to her friend, Roya. Roya is a successful construction site manager (or engineer, her job isn't really explained) who immediately rushes to the Cardiac Disease Hospital to meet up with Fereshteh and try and help her husband, who has been admitted. The film then jumps into the past for a while, showing us how Roya and Fereshteh first meet at Tehran university, where a wealthy Roya can afford to take mathematics lessons from the very intelligent Fereshteh.
However, things turn dark after a strange man begins stalking and harassing Fereshteh. The man goes so far as to throw acid into Fereshteh's cousin's face after thinking he was her boyfriend. When this man, Hassan, is eventually arrested for 13 years, and the rich man who posted bail for Fereshteh proposes to her. She reluctantly accepts, wanting more to go back to university, and things go downhill from there. Her husband is wildly jealous, starting fights with men who even look at Fereshteh, locking her in the home, hiding the telephone, and even forbidding her to read. Fereshteh is strong, but is eventually broken down after not being able to find sympathy from anyone while enduring the constant demeaning from her husband.
The film jumps back at the end a few times to the present, showing Roya's attempts to use her connections in order to save Fereshteh's husband, who was stabbed by a recently freed Hassan.
The saddest part is perhaps the very ending of the film, after Fereshteh gets news that her husband is dead. Finally free, she finds that she has no way to go back to the dreams she had on account of her kids, saying something to the effect of "I feel like a free bird without wings." While it is the tale of Roya and Fereshteh, it is my opinion that the two women are in fact Fereshteh, as I mentioned earlier. We see a once free and ambitious woman become completely broken down into another woman entirely, and we can do nothing for her but watch and wonder.