REVIEW: 'Reading Lolita in Tehran'

The memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran has many, many fans, and they should be pleased by this faithful film adaptation. Staying very true to its source material, former English literature professor Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir about hosting a secret weekly book club with female students in post-revolutionary Iran, means the film can sometimes feel overly episodic, like chapters in a book rather than visual sequences in a narrative arc. But filmmaker Eran Riklis and team have succeeded in conveying the tale’s still-timely messages and capturing its tone.

Nafisi’s memoir offers a nuanced critique not just of post-revolutionary Iran, but of oppression in general and the pervasive fear and dread of living under an authoritarian regime. Playing the author, veteran actress Golshifteh Farahani gives a subtle performance, credible as both intelligent, trusted mentor-professor and increasingly frightened woman-mother-daughter-wife. 

The film opens on Nafisi lying in bed, eyes wide open, remembering the screams of a person (whose story comes to light later), “They lied to us! They lied to us!” Her inability to sleep due to such memory-fueled nightmares is a recurring theme in the film. It bookends her daytime experiences, which are structured (like the book, though not exactly) into parts named for classic English-language works she’s teaching.

The film shifts some scenes around and changes the book’s original order to set the scene first, as Nafisi and her husband return to Iran following the 1979 Revolution. It’s a smart set-up as viewers are provided clues to both the main character (books and an Oklahoma University mug in her suitcase) and the context (her excitement about coming back to teach quickly dampened by the hostile treatment of male customs agents).

That tension of people just trying to live their everyday lives in a society becoming increasingly radicalized remains throughout the film. We feel it through the hardline moral stance of some of Nafisi’s male students, the imprisonment and torture (and death) of female students and her risky friendship with a retired male professor. We feel it in the tension with her husband, a loving partner who still can’t fully understand her experience as a woman in contemporary Iran.

We feel it in scenes where Nafisi is roughly patted down, and when student Sanaz is intimately inspected and forced to confess to an affair she didn’t have. We feel it in the conversations of her students (an excellent collection of Iranian actresses), who relate to the protagonists of the stories they’re reading (“Are we Lolita?”) but are not allowed to experience some of their rites of passage themselves (falling in love, dancing, basic freedoms).

When some of the characters choose to leave Iran, we gather the significance of what they leave behind. A closing scene has Nafisi waking up once again to a nightmare. She goes to her office and sits down at her desk, situated—as in her Tehran apartment—in front of a big window. She looks wistfully out at the framed view of Washington, DC monuments, which has replaced her former Tehran vista of the stunning Alborz mountains towering behind the city. 

Her gaze turns to two photos on the wall. In one, she and her former female students stand together in black robes and head scarves (“according to the law of the land,” the book notes). In the other, the same group, laughing and colorful in street clothes. Same people, completely different sensation, totally transformed mood. It’s taken from a description of the two photos in the opening pages of the book. It was a clever move to end the film on these photos, characters we now know and presumably now empathize with. 

The contrasting photos remind us of the complexity of women’s public and personal lives in Iran, yes, but also of the bonds they share, of the beauty and support to be found in female friendship (as in books and imagination). They remind us of all that Nafisi had to leave behind—and, of course, of all that’s still to be found in Tehran. 

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This review originally ran on AWFJ.org.

Images courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.