Health & Wellness
An Israeli Tackle a Trendy Iranian Basic
Jan
The previous few years might be remembered because the nadir of Iranian-Israeli relations, and the primary event when the 2 international locations 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 writer, with an nearly totally Iranian solid. The movie premiered on the Rome Movie Fest final yr and is now beginning to tour the USA.
Anybody sufficiently old to recollect cultural life firstly of this century will know the ebook. Azar Nafisi’s memoir got here out in 2003, spent 36 weeks on the New York Instances best-seller record, and rapidly 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—are usually not identified for his or her page-turning thrillers. However Nafisi’s story and prose are fascinating. She’d gone to Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution within the hope of placing her American schooling 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 lounge, delving into the masterpieces that the Islamic Republic forbade: the Vladimir Nabokov novel that offers the memoir its identify, alongside the works of Henry James and Jane Austen, in addition to one in every of 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 a long time following the 1979 revolution. Her ebook isn’t nearly studying and instructing literature underneath 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 international 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 obtained. 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 capturing location, provided that Tehran was not an possibility.
When the ebook was initially launched in 2003, the American zeitgeist, formed by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s international Conflict on Terror, was rife with debates concerning the representations of Muslim girls and life within the Center East. Nafisi’s was one in every of a number of well-liked memoirs by Iranian girls revealed throughout this era, together with Firoozeh Dumas’s Humorous in Farsi (2003) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis sequence (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 Conflict, some critics lumped her in with neoconservatives as a result of she portrayed the travails of Iranians underneath 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 underneath its rule, was at all times patently ridiculous. The declare bears up significantly poorly in 2024, two years after women-centered protests rocked Iran underneath the slogan “Girls, Life, Freedom.” What Nafisi does finest, and the rationale her work has endured, is exactly to refuse cartoonish portrayals and fundamental morality performs.
In Riklis, identified for his empathetic depiction of Israelis and Palestinians in movies similar 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 properly for having been shot in Italy and directed by an Israeli who has by no means set foot within the nation. The dialogue is usually in Persian, a language Riklis doesn’t converse; he was in a position to pull this off with the assistance of a fastidiously 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 susceptible.
The younger girls of the clandestine class embody Sanaz (Zar Amir), who has survived imprisonment and torture; Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi, in one of many movie’s most pleasant performances), who, in contrast to most of her classmates, wore the Islamic veil even earlier than the revolution and defends a great 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 condo, 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, slightly literary republic that survives the years of conflict and revolution. In a single memorable scene, Nafisi has the scholars observe 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 up to date households in Iran.
The movie additionally ventures past that cloistered house. Bahri (Reza Diako), a religious 1979 revolutionary, is nonetheless an avid pupil in Nafisi’s class on the college earlier than it’s shut down. Regardless of their diametrically opposed politics, Nafisi and Bahri type a bond. Early within the story, she tells him his essay on Huckleberry Finn is one of the best she’s ever obtained from a pupil, even in America. The 2 reconnect when Bahri returns from the Iran-Iraq Conflict 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 means, each movie and ebook keep away from didacticism. And in doing so, they exhibit 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 a logo 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 in opposition to.
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 grow to be like their oppressors. And she or he isn’t 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 a logo.” (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.” Relatively, Nafisi is rejecting the revolutionaries’ tendency to deal with all that surrounds them as a area of symbols. Individuals 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 method.”
This message concerning the humane energy of literature makes Studying Lolita in Tehran a murals somewhat than an train in sloganeering. And the truth that now, greater than twenty 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 group middle on the Higher West Facet, included American Jews, Israelis, and Iranians. What we had in frequent was the expertise of being gripped by a narrative concerning the capability of literature to disclose us to at least one one other as ends somewhat than as means. The setup may sound mawkish. However I like to recommend avoiding the temptation of cynicism and embracing the movie as really one for these instances.