'Reading Lolita in Tehran' Review: Correct but Shallow
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- Eran Riklis directed the Greenwich Entertainment adaptation of Azar Nafisi's 2003 bestselling memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," now playing in select theaters.
- Golshifteh Farahani plays Nafisi across two timelines — as a late-1970s University of Tehran professor forced out for refusing theocratic rules, and as a mid-1990s exile running a clandestine book club for women.
- The secret sessions center on banned works including Nabokov's "Lolita," Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," and Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", used by the women to map their own constrained roles in Iranian society.
- The film leans on a visual contrast — bright, colorful book club scenes set against gray, muddy depictions of Tehran — to convey the liberation the women find through reading.
- The reviewer praises Farahani's eyes-driven performance as conveying the pain of a woman whose mind offers more than her society permits, but calls the film "an after-school special about the magic of reading."
- The review concludes the film will satisfy devotees of Nafisi's memoir but offers little to viewers not already sold on the universality of great literature — the film's audience, in the critic's view, converts before buying a ticket.
Why it matters: A film aimed at literary devotees offers nothing to viewers not already sold on literature's universality, the reviewer argues. Nafisi's real defiance — Iranian women reading banned Nabokov in secret to survive theocratic oppression — lands as a safe, earnest 'after-school special,' diluting the rebellion the original memoir captured.
