The Day I Became a Woman, Marzieh Meshkini's directorial debut, exemplifies the subversive visual poetry that flows through the best Iranian cinema. Not surprising: Censorship often sparks creative ingenuity, while total freedom of expression can spawn democratic dreck. Iranian auteurs are past masters at spinning gorgeous little children's tales through which hard truths about adult life are exquisitely threaded. Recall Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple: The hideous repression of women in a fundamentalist society bleeds through the fact-based story of two little girls kept under literal house arrest. (World-class director Mohsen Makhmalbaf--Samira's father and Meshkini's husband--scripted both films.)

A tripartite parable, Meshkini's first film commemorates Iranian maiden, wife, and crone in unique, cumulatively mythic styles. In the first story, Hava, a lively nine-year-old, has until noon, the hour of her birth, for play in the world with best boyfriend Hassan. After that, her mother and granny are happy to shroud her in a "beautiful" dead-black chador, signifying her retreat into walled Iranian womanhood.

The grave girl-child wanders about in something of a dreamscape--a white-rocked promontory overlooking a blue ocean--and shares final candy with Hassan through a barred window. Her fate is implied through telling images: a stick stuck upright in the sand that will signal noon by failing to cast a shadow; the yellow fish she receives in trade for her black scarf--recast as a sail for a boat cobbled together out of boards and barrels. Inexorably, the day draws toward that moment when Hava becomes her own shadow, all the color and motion and innocence of this bright spirit brought under cover, grounded.

The second, most viscerally affecting chapter in Meshkini's day begins in exhilarating motion: The camera plunges across a scrubby plain, keeping pace with a man mounted on a gorgeous Arabian stallion. Tracking shots generate heady freedom, terrific forward momentum, and, especially, male power and privilege. Ahead, on a road running parallel to the sea, a clutch of women in black chadors pedal their bikes as though bent on truly getting somewhere. Catching up to his wife among this faintly ridiculous herd, the angry horseman-husband almost ritually admonishes Ahoo to abandon her willful ways. Facing her, the camera records Ahoo's desperate courage as she speeds ahead, her chador caught in her teeth to keep it from blowing away.

The brilliantly choreographed bicycle-ride and horse-chase scene that follows sometimes slows but always recovers momentum: Ahoo's life-race takes your breath away and breaks your heart. Meshkini juxtaposes the small, brave chimes of a bike bell with pounding hooves, the round wheels propelled by shrouded Ahoo with slow-motion shots of the piston-like legs of horses and the arrogantly naked torsos of the mullah, father, and brothers who ride them.

In Meshkini's final (and least successful) season of women, a bent old lady named Hoora flies into the city to buy out a mall's worth of furniture, pots and pans, white bridal dress, and appliances. Friendly kids set everything up on the beach, creating a Fellini-esque frolic that puts an antic period to an empty life. Before Hoora and all her gear take to the sunlit sea on a flotilla of boats, we are given word of Ahoo, now essentially the stuff of legend. And we glimpse again the face of that little girl to whom noon brought womanhood: Witnessing the mysterious exodus, her expression conveys neither despair nor aspiration. She simply waits.

The new sisterhood of American feminism can't be bothered by faraway gender wars that might distract from getting and having it all. And reviewers of films like The Apple and The Day I Became a Woman are often curiously lacking in the kind of outrage such stories ought to inspire. Could it be that political correctness has so far infected our thinking that we've come to cloak even the most horrific violations of human rights in cultural immunity?