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A film dramatization about the only Iranian woman sent to report on the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, "Adieu La Vie" (a.k.a. "Good Night, Commander") confounds expectations by heading in a wholly different direction from a Western war movie. Instead of a blustering, heroic heroine coming face to face with tragedy, first-time director Ensieh Shah-Hosseini empathizes with a confused, scared young protag whose chief goal is to hightail it back to Tehran. Pic was popular at the recent Fajr festival, and ought to have a fighting chance of finding some niche distribution abroad.

How close Shah-Hosseini's screenplay follows the true story is unknown, but in any case, the adventures of the unnamed journalist are absorbing and a bit hair-raising. Though pic sometimes gets lost struggling for antiwar symbolism, like its unlikely poster shot of a desert battlefield strewn with empty helmets, it generally keeps its nose to the ground as it follows its heroine from the frontline to an endangered village on the Iraq border.

Disguised as a man in army fatigues and a tightly wrapped scarf under her helmet, protag (Ladan Mostofi) wanders alone through a desert wasteland. It's later explained that she volunteered to report from the front after being divorced by a man who ruined her life. Her high connections got her the unusual assignment, but the army allowed her to do almost nothing until she jumped on a supply truck and escaped from her unit.

In the confusion of the front, she wanders from battlefields to field hospitals without being questioned. At last, she meets Beshar (a gruff Mohammad Mokhtari), not knowing he is a top-level commander, and tells her story. He gets her a ride to a village hidden between palm trees and marshland where she will be safe. But the village has just been attacked by the Iraqis, and the journalist is forced to migrate to another village with a local woman (Esmat Reza-Pour.)

A surprising amount of screen time is devoted to an ill-fated wedding party (the bride has been killed by the Iraqis), yet this directorial choice gives film a chance to explore the war's terrible toll on civilian life. Like last year's fest favorite "Gilaneh," also directed by a woman, it is on the edges of combat that the war's impact is felt most strongly.

Finale returns the journalist to the front, where she finds commandant Beshar wounded and carries him to a field hospital. Editing nicely circumvents the forbidden shot of a man and woman touching, while strongly implying a love story in the making.

Largely deprived of heroics, the attractive Mostofi creates a believable woman whose lust for life returns in the midst of death. Though she certainly demonstrates courage by being there at all, she is not above unmanly tears when pushed to extremes. The puzzle remains why, thrust into war correspondent's heaven, and with a telephoto lens peaking out from under her rucksack, she never snaps a picture or takes a note.

One wishes some of the pic's more illogical elements could have been avoided, like the protag's untreated arm wound which worries the viewer throughout the film. Shah-Hosseini's direction of big battle scenes is less distinguished than her personal touch in quieter moments, such as a shocking incident when the journo is beaten by a truck driver who thinks she is a man making unseemly overtures to his young daughter.

Tech work is professional, from Nader Masoomi's raw desert photography on down.

Camera (color), Nader Masoomi; additional photography, Ali Allahyari; editor, Kaveh Imani; music, Saeid Ansari; art director, Abbas Bolvandi; sound, Abbas Rastegarpour; special effects, Mohsen Rouzbahani. Reviewed at Fajr Film Festival (competing), Jan. 25, 2006. Running time: 95 MIN.

With: Mahmoud Ghadesi

Many recent Iranian films are about the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, claimed a million lives and, as journalist Robert Fisk noted, "touched every family in both countries."

News photo

Ensieh Shah-Hosseini

Despite state control of the Iranian media, not all these films are straight propaganda, as Ensieh Shah-Hosseini's "Goodbye, Life" illustrates.

Screened at this year's Fukuoka International Film Festival and scheduled to play at more festivals in Europe and the United States, "Goodbye, Life" has plenty of bloodshed but little in the way of conventional heroics. Instead, it presents the chaos of battle, the resilience of the noncombatants, the humanity of the enemy and the personal growth of the heroine -- a young woman who comes to the front posing as a journalist, with the intent of finding an "honorable" death. Her real aim: suicide.

Modeled on Shah-Hosseini herself, Maryam (Ladan Mostofi) carries a camcorder (the same one Shah-Hosseini used as a war reporter), wears a man's army uniform to disguise her identity (including Shah-Hosseini's own helmet) and is distraught from a failed marriage. But as she stumbles among the shell bursts, she finds, not the sweet oblivion she was seeking but war in its all-too-real confusion, pain and fear. She decides she wants to live, especially after an encounter with a handsome commander, Bashar (Mohammed Mokhtari), who offers to help her escape the war zone and return to Tehran.

First, though, she must undergo a Dante's tour of the hell of war, beginning with an abandoned village where a bride-to-be has been slaughtered by Iraqi soldiers, an Arab encampment preparing for the wedding that will never be and a field of helmets, as far as the eye can see, that are mute reminders of the dead. She becomes close to a woman in the camp, Jenan (Esmat Reza-Pour), who may accept the rules of her ultratraditional society but is outspoken, passionate and welcoming. Maryam becomes close to Jenan -- finding in her a reflection of her better self, but war threatens again. Maryam's tour of hell is not yet over.

Shah-Hosseini, a prizewinning novelist and filmmaker, underwent transitions similar to Maryam's. "At first I wasn't thinking about my country or the war," she told The Japan Times at the Fukuoka festival. "My reasons for going to the front were personal. I married during the revolution. Back then I was idealistic about men and my country, but in my first year of marriage my feelings about both changed."

She went to the front much as her heroine did -- disappointed in love, with no greater ambition than to escape.

Seeing war first hand, however, shocked her out of her self absorption. She remembers seeing an Iraqi soldier searching for his brother and finding he had fallen in battle. "That sight affected me more than anything I saw among the Iranian soldiers," she reminisces. "Now the Iraqis are fighting the Americans, but when I see that an American soldier has been killed, I am saddened, just as I am saddened when I see an Iraqi killed by the Americans. It saddens me whenever human beings are killed."

Shah-Hosseini has also spent much time with the Arab tribe she depicts in the film, who were determined to carry on with their lives, even though their ancestral lands were on the front line. "They had it the toughest of any (group) because they lived the closest to the border, but during the war no one thought to help them," Shah-Hosseini said. "Instead they had to find their own way to survive. I had great sympathy for their struggle."

Like the Arabs she admired -- neutrals who finally took up arms to protect themselves -- Shah-Hosseini came to hate war but does not consider herself a pacifist. "The Iranian people are like that -- they are basically peaceful and wish no harm to anyone, but when they are attacked they will defend themselves -- I think that's only natural," she comments.

She also found that war, for all its horrors, has "one good thing about it.'

"Through war, human beings can discover strengths that they never thought they had," she says. "When you are leading a peaceful life, you do not use your full strength -- you do not even know you have it. But in an extraordinary situation like war, you realize you do have strength. I don't mean the strength to destroy, but to build."

Her sympathetic portrayal of Iraqis in the film, she says, reflects not only her own view, but another national trait. "We Iranians were able to forgive the Iraqi people soon (after the war) -- that's just the way we are," she explains. "The religion of Islam places a high value on love -- not everyone in the West knows that. We are like a white slate that people from the outside color in their own fashion. It's easy to draw on white -- to invent your own image about people you don't know."