Women Without Men opens with a woman falling through the air: first her veil, then her body, both floating to the ground like feathers. As we quickly learn, this is the suicide of an Iranian girl nearing 30, tired of her brother’s demands that she marry, but the scene has the feeling of quiet release, not of death.

This beautifully shot film, set in Tehran during the period leading up to the 1953 coup which toppled the democratically elected government, is a quiet and understated look at the lives of four very different women's struggle for freedom.

Munis is the woman in the opening sequence. When she is somehow magically resurrected (although we are never quite sure if she returns as flesh or ghost) she becomes embroiled in a communist plot to prevent a military coup.

Her friend Faezeh is in love with Munis’s brother but he is to marry someone else. Eventually Munis leads her to a forest, where she meets Fakhri, an older, wealthy woman, who has bought a house nearby to escape her obnoxious military husband.

Fakhri has also rescued Zarin, a young prostitute, who we have seen earlier in a scene that is almost unwatchable, trying to scrub away her sins from her shockingly skinny frame until she bleeds, in the public baths. The discovery of Zarin, floating like The Lady of Shalott in the stream, is a symbol that recalls Munis’s suicide: one girl may have gone but perhaps the other can be saved.

The title of the film is misleading. This isn’t an angry feminist rant about men oppressing women, although there are several dislikeable male characters, for example, the punters who visit Zarin and Fakhri’s husband. It is more a dream of what could have been, an examination of how few options these women have. And unlike some films about similar topics, this film doesn’t look to western education or culture for a solution. Indeed, one scene mocks the philosophers who argue about Camus, while a girl lies dying upstairs.

Some critics will no doubt argue that this is more a series of pictures than a proper film, and the plot and dialogue do feel disjointed at times. But this is what makes the film so wonderfully ethereal and highlights how unlikely some of it is. Could these women ever really find sanctuary from the lives they have left behind, or is the house and its enchanted forest an imagined place borne of desperation?

The director, the exiled Iranian video artist Shirin Neshat, has brought an extraordinary sense of style to a topic that is normally overwhelmed by people's need to make a political statement. Through muted colours and hushed tones, her own statement resonates more strongly.

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