Director: Jafar Panahi
Year Released: 2003
Rating: 2.0
A pizza deliveryman grows disgruntled with his place in life and his poverty (apparently), so he, out of 'desperation,' holds up a posh jewelry store. While some consider this deep and involving, it really is just a one-dimensional story (Panahi and screenwriter Kiarostami, although beloved in the film community, are not the deepest of thinkers) about class inequality with the only difference being that this is set in Iran instead of America or some other part of the world with a similar social problem. It's tough to read much into the main character since he's both lumbering and taciturn, and his unhappiness at being poor is, quite frankly, nothing revelatory - since he cannot properly enunciate why he is so downtrodden, it's more a film about his lack of a therapeutic outlet than a small-scale proletariat uprising. Casting a real-life schizophrenic in the role of the lead character doesn't help the Neo-Socialist theme: it diminishes the deliveryman's intended anguish and jealousy and makes the crime he commits look like the outburst of clinical insanity rather than bourgeois longing.
