{"id":198990,"date":"2026-07-09T21:40:29","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/198990\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T21:40:29","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:40:29","slug":"reading-lolita-in-tehran-review-seeing-the-words-clearly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/198990\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Reading Lolita in Tehran\u2019 Review: Seeing the Words Clearly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Two decades after it was published, \u201cReading Lolita in Tehran,\u201d Azar Nafisi\u2019s <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/04\/15\/books\/books-of-the-times-book-study-as-insubordination-under-the-mullahs.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">best-selling memoir<\/a> of teaching fiction in post-revolution Iran, gets a serviceable adaptation for the screen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">When she is still teaching at a university, she invites her class to put \u201cThe Great Gatsby\u201d 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\u2019s a topic on which Nafisi\u2019s insights are better served by her own writing; the screenplay by Marjorie David tends to flatten the connections between the literary and the personal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The movie also depicts the transformation of social structures in Iran. Nafisi attends a censored screening of Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s \u201cThe Sacrifice.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">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 (\u201cCup Final,\u201d \u201cLemon Tree\u201d) have brought the same world-weary optimism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-f3337s erlrjdy0\">Reading Lolita in Tehran<br \/>Not rated. In Persian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two decades after it was published, \u201cReading Lolita in Tehran,\u201d Azar Nafisi\u2019s best-selling memoir of teaching fiction in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[3587,58769,58765,58767,58768,34,42278,58766,58763,58764,69,58770],"class_list":["post-198990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tehran","tag-azar","tag-ebrahimi","tag-eran","tag-farahani","tag-golshifteh","tag-iran","tag-movies","tag-nafisi","tag-reading-lolita-in-tehran-movie","tag-riklis","tag-tehran","tag-zar-amir"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116892193512428469","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}