Having written and directed more than twenty films during a career that has spanned half a century, Dariush Mehrjui has iconic status, and is famous for presenting exceptionally strong characterizations of women in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema (Banoo, Sara, Pari, Leila, Bemani). But Mehrjui is less recognized for his depictions of men’s vulnerability; both in his pre-revolutionary works and in his post-revolutionary films (fourteen films with male protagonists). This paper analyzes the contradictory depictions of gender in Dariush Mehrjui’s films, with a particular focus on his representations of vulnerable male protagonists. In many of Mehrjui's pre-revolutionary films, men are portrayed as naïve, powerless, incompetent characters who are victims of a hostile social system. The male characters of his pre-revolutionary films fit common characterizations of progressive politics of the time (1960s- 1970s): they are rural peasants or working class urban poor, overwhelmed by alienation and injustice. In his post-revolutionary films, Mehrjui’s characters are more like the educated, urban middle-class audience members who would come to see his films. These are flawed human characters who are as much or more limited by their own psychology, as the legal or political barriers of their society. But while the women characters struggle and usually overcome their psychological (and social) barriers, Mehrjui’s men are more confounded by their own emotional contradictions and internal conflicts. In many of these post-revolutionary films, for a variety of reasons determined by the individual plot, women leave men, whether temporarily or forever. At that moment, Mehrjui’s male characters show their most vulnerable side: in almost all of his post-revolutionary films, there is a scene or two in which the men beg the women to come back and claim they cannot live without them. Despite and perhaps even because of the social limits on gender roles in Iranian post-revolutionary society, the women claim their freedom, and the men find themselves bereft. Mehrjui’s male protagonists struggle with their sense of abandonment, and their efforts to process the emotions of their symbolic castration within a patriarchal social structure are consistently incomplete. Close analysis of the films, including Postchi, Hamoun, Derakht-e Golabi, Santouri, demonstrates a repetitive pattern and an unconscious dynamic in the representation of Mehrjui’s men as vulnerable beings who beg women to stay in their lives comparing to the strong women characters and their representation in his films.