The previous few years might be remembered because the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the primary event when the 2 nations attacked one another straight. However they had been additionally a golden interval for Iranian-Israeli collaboration in cinema. In 2023, Tatami was the first-ever movie to be co-directed by an Israeli (Man Nattiv) and an Iranian (Zar Amir). And in 2024 got here Studying Lolita in Tehran, directed by Eran Riklis, who’s Israeli, and tailored from a ebook by an Iranian creator, with an nearly totally Iranian solid. The movie premiered on the Rome Movie Fest final yr and is now beginning to tour the US.
Anybody sufficiently old to recollect cultural life in the beginning of this century will know the ebook. Azar Nafisi’s memoir got here out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Occasions best-seller checklist, and shortly developed a cult following. A reviewer for The Nation confessed to lacking a dental appointment, a enterprise lunch, and a deadline simply because she couldn’t put the ebook apart.
Literary students—Nafisi is an English professor—usually are not recognized for his or her page-turning thrillers. However Nafisi’s story and prose are charming. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution within the hope of placing her American training to make use of by instructing English at a college. As a substitute, she was hounded out of the classroom by authorities hostile to Western literature. She wound up holding clandestine seminars for younger girls in her front room, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that provides the memoir its identify, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, in addition to one in all Nafisi’s favorites, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Nice Gatsby. Nafisi brings these classics into dialogue with the real-life tales of younger Iranians within the heady many years following the 1979 revolution. Her ebook isn’t nearly studying and instructing literature below a repressive regime, however about how literature in and of itself might function an antidote to all that the regime stood for.
Regardless of its world fame and translation into 32 languages, Studying Lolita in Tehran was by no means become a movie prior to now, principally as a result of Nafisi didn’t just like the proposals she’d acquired. Then, seven years in the past, Riklis got here round, as he recounted to a New York viewers on January 13, after a particular screening of the movie. The Israeli director managed to persuade Nafisi of his imaginative and prescient—after which to safe the funding, assemble an acceptable Iranian solid, and decide on Rome because the taking pictures location, on condition that Tehran was not an choice.
When the ebook was initially launched in 2003, the American zeitgeist, formed by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s world Warfare on Terror, was rife with debates concerning the representations of Muslim girls and life within the Center East. Nafisi’s was one in all a number of in style memoirs by Iranian girls revealed throughout this era, together with Firoozeh Dumas’s Humorous in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis collection (2000–03). And maybe inevitably, given its success, Nafisi’s ebook grew to become the topic of political scrutiny, a lot of it bearing little relation to the ebook’s content material. Though Nafisi opposed the Iraq Warfare, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives as a result of she portrayed the travails of Iranians below an anti-American regime. One scholar even proclaimed that he noticed no distinction between her and American troopers convicted of abusing prisoners in Iraq.
Greater than 20 years later, Riklis’s loyal adaptation has opponents simply because the ebook did, and much more so due to the nationality of its director. In Tehran, the regime media have denounced the movie as furnishing a “pretext for attacking Iran” and referred to as its Iranian actors “traitors working with Zionists.” One outlet claimed that the movie peddled a “violent, anti-culture, anti-art, and anti-human view of Iran and Iranians.”
The concept that Studying Lolita in Tehran is anti-Iranian due to its portrayal of the Islamic Republic, and of the life of girls below its rule, was at all times patently ridiculous. The declare bears up significantly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran below the slogan “Ladies, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does finest, and the explanation her work has endured, is exactly to refuse cartoonish portrayals and fundamental morality performs.
In Riklis, recognized for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in movies corresponding to Lemon Tree and Dancing Arabs, her ebook finds an ready interpreter who has stayed true to its ethos. The movie isn’t impartial. It vividly tells the story of how puritanical Islamist goons attacked universities within the early years after 1979, imposed obligatory veiling on girls, and banned books they didn’t like. However neither is it a easy story of scary Islamists versus heroic girls resisters.
The movie captures the environment of Iran within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s remarkably nicely for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has by no means set foot within the nation. The dialogue is generally in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t communicate; he was capable of pull this off with the assistance of a rigorously chosen solid of diasporic Iranians. Golshifteh Farahani, maybe the best-known Iranian actor outdoors the nation, is at her top as Nafisi, whom she performs as assured however humane, by turns brazen and weak.
The younger girls of the clandestine class embrace Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of many movie’s most pleasant performances), who, not like most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even earlier than the revolution and defends a perfect of modesty as advantage; and Azin (Lara Wolf), whose a number of divorces make her an object of fascination to the much less skilled college students, however who seems to be affected by home abuse.
In Nafisi’s house, the scholars are removed from the prying eyes of the regime and in addition of males (even the professor’s husband is barred from their conferences). They assemble for themselves, in that all-female room, a little bit literary republic that survives the years of battle and revolution. In a single memorable scene, Nafisi has the scholars apply a Jane Austen–period dance as a part of their research of Pleasure and Prejudice, drawing parallels between the stifling guidelines of courtship in Victorian England and people of some modern households in Iran.
The movie additionally ventures past that cloistered house. Bahri (Reza Diako), a religious 1979 revolutionary, is however an avid scholar in Nafisi’s class on the college earlier than it’s shut down. Regardless of their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri kind a bond. Early within the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is the most effective she’s ever acquired from a scholar, even in America. The 2 reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq Warfare of 1980–88, having misplaced an arm. He has used his household connections to the regime to acquire a shock reward for his previous professor: two tickets to The Sacrifice, by Andrei Tarkovsky, displaying on the Tehran movie competition. The connection between Nafisi and Bahri is introduced with complexity and with out sentimentality, neither papering over political variations nor caricaturing Bahri as a generic revolutionary.
On this approach, each movie and ebook keep away from didacticism. And in doing so, they reveal precisely the purpose Nafisi explores along with her college students, which is the facility of literature to stir empathy throughout seemingly unbridgeable divides. When the group discusses The Nice Gatsby, Nafisi insists on understanding the forbidden love that Daisy Buchanan, the married socialite, has for Jay Gatsby as a real human feeling, not an emblem of Western perfidy, as a few of her extra revolutionary college students declare it to be. The latter advocate banning the ebook. Nafisi organizes a mock trial for the novel in her class, with college students divided into groups for and towards.
Nafisi calls on college students on either side of the political divide to deal with one another with humanity. When she catches some in her class expressing glee on the wartime deaths of pro-regime friends, she enjoins them to not change into like their oppressors. And she or he is not any dogmatic opponent of Islam, solely of religiously impressed repressive authorities: At one level Nafisi tells Bahri, “My grandmother was probably the most religious Muslim I knew. She by no means missed a prayer. However she wore her scarf as a result of she was religious, not as a result of she was an emblem.” (I’m not the one critic with a Muslim background who discovered this line highly effective.)
The purpose right here isn’t simply to repeat the liberal platitude that “the issue isn’t with Islam however with its repressive enforcement.” Fairly, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to deal with all that surrounds them as a discipline of symbols. Persons are value greater than that, she tells them and us, as if echoing the Kantian dictum to deal with each other “as an finish, by no means merely as a way.”
This message concerning the humane energy of literature makes Studying Lolita in Tehran a murals slightly than an train in sloganeering. And the truth that now, greater than 20 years after the ebook’s launch, and at a time of regional pressure, an Israeli filmmaker has labored with Iranians to adapt Nafisi’s ebook to the display offers the movie a particular energy.
The viewers on the screening I attended, at a Jewish neighborhood middle on the Higher West Aspect, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in widespread was the expertise of being gripped by a narrative concerning the capability of literature to disclose us to 1 one other as ends slightly than as means. The setup would possibly sound mawkish. However I like to recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the movie as really one for these occasions.