The situation of women under Islam is, one might say, the occasion of Rapture. But it rises to a universal level of humanistic allegory, making it significant for us all. It is, moreover, a good example of what one would look for in identifying contemporary masterpieces. Its currency is assured by the technology of video projection, which did not exist when the canon of great art was formed. But there is something almost timeless in the action: The narrative itself could have been enacted in the remote past.

One enters through curtains into a darkened space. To the left and right are two facing screens. The left screen belongs to the Women, the right one to the Men. Women and Men enact different sequences, connected through the fact that most of the Women's actions are in response to the actions of the Men. The responses of the Men to the Women, on the other hand, are few and far between. The Men are mostly involved with one another, and by the time the story is over, the Women, too, seem mostly involved with one another. It is a narrative of an achieved separate identity for the Women. No individual stands out in either group: There are no heroes and there are no speeches. The only characters are the two groups, consisting of more than a hundred people each. It is as if there were a chorus that had divided itself in two, according to gender. It has been speculated that the earliest Greek tragedies were written for choruses only, the hero being a later invention. In Nietzsche's account of the birth of tragedy, the tragic chorus was an invocation to a god, and the hero was the god made manifest. There is no god in Rapture, however, and nothing to bring the two choruses into a unified whole. The Men are dressed alike in neat white shirts and black trousers. The Women are dressed alike as well, in the traditional black chador. The film is in black and white.

In the first pair of shots, a stony desert and a heavily fortified castle face each other. (The building seems to date from the era of the Crusades.) The Desert is the site of the Women, the Castle that of the Men. Desert and Castle are connected somewhat in the way in which Troy was connected to the field outside its walls, where the great combat took place. In Homer, the women are protected by the walls of Troy, while in Rapture, the Castle belongs entirely to the men, and the actions of the women take place under its walls, in the stony desert outside them. There is a battery of fierce antique cannons around the Castle's battlements, but they have long been abandoned, like the Castle itself. It is now more a playground for the Men than a building with a military function.

In the next shots, we see the Women, their black garments fluttering, advancing toward the Castle. At the same time we hear--and then see--the Men parading through what we will infer is the Castle's gate. There is a moment when the Women and the Men stop and face one another across the gallery. There is no effort to get together, and the Men begin to take up various activities of no obvious consequence, mainly in the castle's courtyard and on the battlements above it. They carry ladders and lean them against the wall. They engage in shoving matches that have the potentiality of turning violent, but don't. Then there is a card game in the center of concentric circles of spectators. The Women, for the most part, appear merely to observe these activities in a distant and passive way. The activities evidently have nothing to do with them, and their faces show no obvious emotion. Then, abruptly, the Women ululate loudly and frighteningly. The piercing sound is a declaration of triumph in Muslim culture, or a battle cry and a taunt. The Women then turn their backs to the Men, perhaps as a gesture of contempt. When they next face the Men, they hold up their palms, overwritten in Farsi script, as in Neshat's self-portraits. I imagine the texts are much the same. The Women then kneel in prayer.

The Men exit the Castle, rhythmically clapping their hands. From the appearances, the men prepare to feast. A steaming caldron is passed from hand to hand, and Persian carpets are unrolled to form paths for the Men to walk on. The Women, however, begin to move away from the Castle, toward the horizon, in no particular formation. The Men watch from the battlements with a certain shallow interest, as if the exodus of the Women were only a matter of curiosity. On the Women's screen, we see a pair of feet beating out a violent tattoo by dancing on a drum. To its accompaniment, the Women move across the sands a heavy boat, of a kind one might have seen on the Sea of Galilee in the time of Jesus. With great strain, the boat is launched, and six women seat themselves. The Women appear to have no oars and trust simply to currents to carry them away, as if surrendering to a higher will. The Men, perfunctorily, wave goodbye. And the film ends.

This bare description gives no sense of the extraordinary beauty of the black-and-white photography and the remarkable choreography with which the Men, and especially the Women, are deployed in their very different spaces. Nor does it give an idea of the powerful music by the Iranian composer and singer Sussan Deyhim. The music gives voice to the various actions. It expresses what the linked sequences show. It combines with the ululation, the clapping and the drum tattoo--the only sounds the two groups make. The work was filmed in Essouria, Morocco, since Shirin Neshat is persona non grata in Iran today. The men and women of the village are the Men and Women of the work.

What is it all about? What has taken place, and what is its meaning? What occasions the Women's triumph? Is it that they have gone off on their own, or is it that they place themselves at Allah's mercy? The work seems to have something urgent to communicate, but it does so in the way a solemn ballet would do. Neshat is still not pointing fingers. "From the beginning," she says, "I made a decision that this work was not going to be about me or my opinions on the subject, and that my position was going to be no position. I then put myself in a place of only asking questions but never answering them." It is not a self-portrait. And the actions are too emblematic to furnish an agenda for social activism in the Middle East. Yet they seem to belong to some immemorial enactment, which has been ritualized and repeated. The work is mesmerizing, and if you are like me, you will want to see it again and again. It is an allegory of obscure but inescapable meaning.

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