Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by the Iranian academic Azar Nafisi, was a bestseller upon its publication in 2003; for a few years, you couldn’t walk into a bookstore without seeing a copy up front. The book told the story of Nafisi, who was born in Iran and was the daughter of a former Tehran mayor. Educated in the West, she returned to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution, at a time when there was some hope that good things would come of it.
Now, timed fortuitously to a war between the U.S. and Iran, there’s a movie adaptation of Reading Lolita in Tehran, from Israeli director Eran Riklis and a script by Marjorie David, an American veteran of TV writers’ rooms. Unable to shoot in Iran for obvious reasons, the film was shot in Italy.
The film tells a worthy story, with Golshifteh Farahani—herself an exile from Iran—capably portraying Nafisi. But the structure is jumbled and confused, jumping back and forth in time.
We see Nafisi teaching literature at the University of Tehran to a co-ed group of students—including one guy with a red beard who looks like Iranian Dave Portnoy—before clashing with the authorities. Later, in the mid-1990s, she’s teaching a clandestine book club for women before leaving Iran for good in 1997. There’s a lot of discussion about examples of classic literature and how they fit with their position as women in that time and place, such as how Humbert Humbert compares to the Ayatollah.
Giving this project to that particular filmmaker seems like a discourse time bomb, and the director being male (!) and Israeli (!!), an IDF veteran (!!!) and making a movie that references Lolita (!!!!) is destined to make some heads explode on Film Twitter and Letterboxd, where it’s mistakenly seen as conventional wisdom that the thesis statement of Nabokov’s novel is “being a pedophile is good.”
Riklis, like most Israeli filmmakers, leans left; he’s spent his career making movies that explore the lives of Middle Eastern women. The “12-day war” between Israel and Iran last year took place while the film was in production. And also in the film is actress Amir Ebrahimi, who starred in and co-directed last year’s Tatami, another rare Israeli/Iranian production.
I judge filmmakers by their work, rather than their gender, nationality, or other demographic characteristics. Riklis, by the way, is of no apparent relation to the late sometime movie producer and Pia Zadora's husband/Golden Globes scandal figure Meshulam Riklis, although Meshulam was also from Israel.
Worthy as Reading Lolita is, there are much better movies about Iran, making many of the same points this movie makes. If you have a choice between watching this and Mohammad Rasoulof’s Seed of the Sacred Fig or Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, seek out the latter films.