As liberals in exile, Nafisi and her husband Bijan understood returning to Iran after the Revolution entailed risks, but they believed they could help shape their country’s future. However, she soon realizes conditions are already worse than she imagined and steadily growing even more restrictive for women. Her husband seems to understand that on an intellectual level, but like many Iranian men, he underestimates or ignores the emotional toll of his wife’s loss of agency.
Her career as an English language professor also suffers. First, she must contend with disruptive Islamist students who employ tactics reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution’s Red Cadres. Soon, she is forced to wear the hajib. Eventually, the erosion of her academic freedoms makes it impossible to work at the university level in any meaningful way. However, she never stops teaching.
Instead, Nafisi secretly tutors small groups of students in her private flat. These sessions function sort of like early book clubs, but there is more to them than that. They are a means for the participants to maintain some sort of meaningful intellectual activity and carve out a supportive female only space in an increasingly misogynistic society.
Rather cleverly, Nafisi associates each section of her memoir with a key text and its corresponding principle female characters, drawing parallels between them and the events unfolding around her. The film starts with The Great Gatsby and the tension between love and money. Most of her students consider Daisy Buchanan merely a luxury commodity to possess (in a revealingly hypocritical way) and a symptom of decadent American capitalism, instead of the ideal of love Gatsby can never attain.
Similarly, Daisy Miller is a scandalous figure, because of her honesty and her defiance of polite society’s hypocrisy. The way Jane Austen captures rigid social structures and rituals mirrors the coded language and subtle deceptions that allow them to navigate the regime’s intrusive restrictions on their daily lives. Of course, Lolita directly speaks to the way the Islamic Republic infantilizes and sexualizes women.
The adaptation co-written by Riklis and Marjorie David is just as literate and elegiac as you would hope and expect. This is a mournful film that pays tribute to lost freedom, suppressed culture, and stolen lives. Yet, it is never polemic. Instead, it is deeply personal and meditative.
Nafisi’s memoir and Riklis’s film certainly indict the Islamist regime’s oppression. However, they call out the men who essentially sold out their wives and daughters for their own comfort, just as much. Yet, it is even more a tribute to the love of literature, very much in the elegant tradition of 84, Charing Cross Road. However, in this case, that love persists under hostile, extreme circumstances. Very highly recommended, Reading Lolita in Tehran opens tomorrow (6/10) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.
