‘Reading Lolita In Tehran’: Tallinn Review

Dir: Eran Riklis. Israel/Italy. 2024. 118mins

The bestselling autobiographical guide by Iranian writer and literature professor Azar Nafisi is tailored into this well timed however cautiously by-the-numbers drama about feminism and mental resistance within the face of a repressive regime.  Directed by Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (The Lemon Tree, The Syrian Bride) and filmed in Italy doubling for Iran, it is a stirring, if conventionally-made story of braveness and curiosity within the face of oppression.

The considerably workmanlike strategy will not be a difficulty for followers of Nafisi’s 2003 memoir

The movie tells Azar’s (Golshifteh Farahani) story: how she and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi) moved again to revolutionary Iran in 1979, filled with hope for the long run. However when the tightening restrictions of the Islamic Republic made it unimaginable for Azar to proceed as a professor of English literature, she was compelled to offer personal lessons in her residence to a gaggle of eager feminine college students. Just like the novel, the movie adopts a chapter construction, with every phase (other than a scene-setting introduction) assigned a piece of traditional English-language literature – therefore the titular reference to Nabakov’s ’Lolita’.

The considerably workmanlike strategy to the filmmaking will not be a difficulty for followers of Nafisi’s 2003 memoir, and Studying Lolita In Tehran is already benefitting from competition consideration – it gained the viewers prize on its world premiere in Rome in October in addition to a particular jury nod. Screening in Tallinn previous to its launch in co-production territory Italy this month, it’ll additionally profit from the worldwide profiles of each Farahani and rising star Zar Amir Ebrahimi (Holy Spider, Shayda, Tatami). 

Half one, ’The Nice Gatsby’, unfolds in 1980, with Azar participating and difficult the minds of her college students within the College of Tehran by the medium of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There are already indicators that the local weather for schooling is altering: a eager pupil, Bahri (Reza Diako) compliments her lessons, however has ready an inventory of “morally acceptable” writers that Azar would possibly wish to consider (she doesn’t).

The extra reactionary members of her class take challenge with ’Gatsby’, and place the guide on trial. It’s a abstract type of justice that performs out within the classroom (the guide is responsible, in fact). However this foreshadows the regime’s response to any concepts that it disagrees with: Azar is shocked and horrified when, following heated pupil protests, certainly one of her 17-year-old feminine college students is arrested, imprisoned and subsequently executed.

The second chapter, which focuses on ’Lolita’, takes place after Azar has left the college – her resistance to the mandated hijab is barely a part of the issue. She now hosts a small group of feminine college students in her front room for debates which are awkwardly reduce along with flashbacks of interrogations and home abuse suffered by the ladies. Nabakov’s guide, the subject for the examine group, supplies a jumping-off level for deeper debates. “Are we Lolita?” says one lady. 

It’s on this side that the movie struggles to take off, each on this and in subsequent chapters devoted to ’Daisy Miller’ and ’Delight And Prejudice’. When dealt with with vitality and a lightness of contact, the impassioned alternate of concepts could make for gripping viewing: take Sarah Polley’s Girls Speaking for instance, or Laurent Cantet’s The Class. Right here, nevertheless, the factors really feel schematic and the controversy is slightly too clearly scripted to seize the mercurial magic of an actual mental argument.

All through all of it, although, Farahani is a robust and charismatic presence. Her Azar is a robust lady whose face speaks volumes even when she chooses to remain silent. However when the attitudes and restrictions of the regime begin to creep into her residence life (her loving, liberal husband flinches at her friendship with a male former colleague), Azar realises that there isn’t a future for her and her household in Iran.