Two decades after it was published, “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” Azar Nafisi’s best-selling memoir of teaching fiction in post-revolution Iran, gets a serviceable adaptation for the screen.
Jumping back and forth in time, mainly from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, the movie follows Nafisi (the exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani; the film was shot in Italy) as she returns to an Iran where the authorities increasingly regard the English-language classics that she loves as suspect.
When she is still teaching at a university, she invites her class to put “The Great Gatsby” on trial. After she leaves academia, she quietly starts a book discussion group for her best female students. In one scene, they consider whether the women of Iran are analogous to Lolita, their lives controlled by old men. It’s a topic on which Nafisi’s insights are better served by her own writing; the screenplay by Marjorie David tends to flatten the connections between the literary and the personal.
The movie also depicts the transformation of social structures in Iran. Nafisi attends a censored screening of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice.” We watch one of her students (the Cannes-winning actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi, credited as Zar Amir) being viciously whipped and forced to sign a false confession.
But the most interesting aspect of this somewhat on-the-nose page-to-screen translation may be extra-textual: It is, unusually, an Israeli-Italian co-production set in Tehran, by a director, Eran Riklis, whose previous films (“Cup Final,” “Lemon Tree”) have brought the same world-weary optimism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Not rated. In Persian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.