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Colorful Journey through Daily Iranian Life
The New York Post
November 11, 1998

'The Mirror" is everything you would expect from an Iranian art film written and directed by Oscar nominee Jafar Pahani.

It is beguiling, sometimes funny, deliberately rough in places and very slow. It is also shot through with what could be read as very subtle criticisms of Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime.

"The Mirror" starts off documentary-style, as a girl whose mother fails to pick her up from school tries to find her way home. A camera kept low to simulate a 7-year-old's perspective accompanies actress Mina Mohammed Khani through the traffic-clogged streets of Tehran and onto what she hopes is the right bus.

Then something bizarre happens. Mina tells director Pahani she's sick of acting and has had enough. Pahani lets her go, but the willful little actress is still miked, so he decides to follow her home with a camera crew.

Like the character she had been playing, Mina doesn't know her address, only that she lives near a big square and a fountain. So the journey becomes an odyssey through Tehran, where we hear Iranians talking about marriage, work, the role of women and the results of the Iran-South Korea soccer game.

For all the oppressiveness of a society that inflicts medieval garb on its women and forces even young girls to sit at the back of a bus, there is also a gentleness about the people Mina encounters on her journey.

There's no way of knowing whether the film is scripted and cut to look spontaneous, or if Mina really had no idea that Pahani's bus was following her.

To the extent that you can see her face under her head scarf, she's a plain, but oddly attractive little thing. And in a way her ordinariness gives you the opportunity to take in the fascinating slice of Tehrani life that is the filmmaker's real subject.