tHe has spent the past few years Nadir will likely be remembered as the man of Iran-Israel relations, the first time the two countries directly attacked each other. But they were also a golden period for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami is the first film ever to be co-directed by an Israeli (Guy Natif) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). Coming in 2024 Reading Lolita in TehranDirected by Israeli Eran Riklis and adapted from a book by an Iranian author, it features an almost entirely Iranian cast. The film premiered at the Rome Film Festival last year and is now touring the United States.
Anyone old enough to remember cultural life at the beginning of this century will know this book. Azar Nafisi's memoirs were released in 2003, in new york times bestseller list and quickly developed a cult following. reviewer's this nation Admitting to missing dental appointments, business lunches, and deadlines simply because she couldn't put her book aside.
Literary Scholar (Nafisi) is a British professor not known for his page-turning thrillers. But Nafisi’s story and prose are captivating. Shortly after the 1979 revolution, she went to Iran, hoping to put her American education to use by teaching English at the university. Instead, she was kicked out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She ended up holding secret seminars for young women in her living room, delving into masterpieces forbidden by the Islamic Republic: Vladimir Nabokov, Nafisi's favorite, Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald the great gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into conversation with real-life stories of young Iranians in the decades after the 1979 revolution. Her book is not just about reading and teaching literature under repressive regimes, but about how literature itself can serve as an antidote to everything the regime stands for.
Despite its global fame and translation into 32 languages, Reading Lolita in Tehran It had never been turned into a film before, mostly because Nafisi didn't like the proposals she received. Then, seven years ago, Riklis told a New York audience on January 13 after a special screening of the film. Israeli directors managed to convince Nafisi of his vision, then to secure funding, assemble a suitable Iranian cast, and settle on Rome as a shooting location since Tehran was not an option.
When the book was originally released in 2003, the American zeitgeist shaped by 9/11 and the Bush administration's global war on terror was filled with debates about the representation of Muslim women and Middle Eastern life. Nafisi's fun to do (2003) and Marjane Satrapi's persepolis Series (2000-03). Perhaps inevitably, given its success, Nafisi's book became the subject of political scrutiny, much of which had little to do with the book's content. Although Nafisi opposed the Iraq war, some critics conflated her with neoconservatives because she portrayed the suffering of Iranians as an anti-American regime. One scholar even declared that there was no difference between him and American soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq.
More than 20 years later, Riklis's faithful adaptation is as antagonistic as the book, even due to the nationality of its director. In Tehran, regime media denounced the film as a "pretext to attack Iran" and called its Iranian actors "traitors who work with the Zionists." One outlet claimed that the film peddled "violent, counter-cultural, anti-artistic and anti-human views."
the idea Reading Lolita in Tehran This is patently absurd due to its portrayal of the Islamic Republic and the lives of women under its rule. In 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran with slogans of "Women, life, freedom," this statement is particularly bad. What Nafisi does best is the rejection of cartoonish characterizations and basic morality plays because her work endures.
In Riklis, known for his sympathetic portrayals of Israel and Palestinians in his films lemon and dancing arabsher book found an interpreter capable of staying true to its spirit. This movie is not neutral. It vividly tells the story of how the puritanical Islamic Goons attacked universities in the early post-1979 period, imposing mandatory veils on women and banning books they did not like. But this is also not a simple story of horrific Islamists taking on heroic women.
The film captures the atmosphere of Iran in the 1980s and the 90s very well as he was shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who had never set foot in the country. The dialogue is mostly in Farsi, a language Riklis doesn't speak. He was able to achieve this with the help of carefully selected diaspora Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, perhaps the best-known Iranian actor outside the country as Nafisi, gives a confident but humane performance that is simultaneously brave and vulnerable.
The secret class of young women includes Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture. Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in the film's most enjoyable performance), unlike most of her classmates, wore an Islamic veil even before the revolution and defended the ideal of modesty. and Assin (Lara Wolf), whose multiple divorces have led her to become the object of a crush on poorer students, but who turns out to be a victim of domestic abuse.
In Nafisi's apartment, students were far away from the prying eyes of the regime and the prying eyes of men (even the professor's husband was banned from meetings). They built themselves an all-female chamber and survived a literary republic in times of war and revolution. In one memorable scene, Nafisi has students practice dances from Jane Austen's time as part of their studies pride and prejudicedraws parallels between the rules of courtship in Victorian England and those of some contemporary families in Iran.
The film also ventures beyond that enclosed space. Bahri (Reza Diako) was a devout 1979 revolutionary and, nonetheless, a fanatical student in Nafisi's class before the shutdown. Despite being polar opposites in politics, Nafisi and Bahri formed a bond. Early in the story, she tells him about his article Huckleberry Finn is the best she has ever gotten from her students, even in America. The two reconnected when Barry returned from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. He's already used his family connections to get a surprise gift for his old professor: two tickets this sacrifice, Written by Andrei Tarkovsky, screened at the Tehran Film Festival. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is full of complexity and devoid of sentimentality, neither a paper about political differences nor a caricature of Bari as a revolutionary in general.
In this way, both the movie and the book avoid handouts. In doing so, they demonstrate exactly what Nafisi explores with her students, which is the power of literature to inspire compassion across seemingly unthinkable divides. when group discussion the great gatsbyNafisi insists on understanding married socialite Daisy Buchanan's feelings for Jay Gatsby as a real human being, rather than a symbol of Westernness, as she Some of the more revolutionary students claimed so. Advocates of the latter banned the book. Nafisi organized a mock trial for the novel in her class, with students divided into and against teams.
Nafisi called on students on both sides of the political divide to treat each other as human beings. When she met some in her class who expressed joy at the wartime deaths of their pro-regime peers, she forbade them from becoming oppressors. She was not a dogmatic opponent of Islam, only a religiously inspired repressive government: "My grandmother was the most devout Muslim I knew," Nafisi told Bahri. "She never missed a prayer. But she Wearing a scarf because she is pious, not because she is a symbol.” (I’m not the only critic with a Muslim background who finds this line powerful.)
The point here is not just to repeat the liberal cliché: “The problem is not with Islam, but with its repressive enforcement.” Instead, Nafisi rejects the tendency of revolutionaries to regard them as symbolic realms tendencies of all people. She tells them, and us, that people are worth more than that, as if echoing Kant's maxim, treat each other "as an end, not merely a means."
A message about the humanitarian power of literature makes Reading Lolita in Tehran A work of art rather than an exercise. Now, two decades after the book's release, and at a time of regional tensions, Israeli filmmakers have teamed up with Iranians to adapt Nafisi's book for the screen, giving the film a special power.
The audience for the screening I attended, at a Jewish community center on the Upper West Side, included American Jews, Israelis and Iranians. What we have in common is experiencing a story about the capacity of literature to reveal each other about our abilities as ends rather than means. The setup may sound mean. But I recommend avoiding the temptation to be cynical and treating this film as a real one.