Unfortunately, these fantasies are visualized all too sensuously by writer-director Maryam Keshavarz, who uses light, color and music to suggest escapes that would have been more at home in an American lesbian romance. If the two teens had been more realistic, innocent and naive, I would have believed in them more.
Then, at about the halfway point, a miscalculation arrives in the form of Atafeh's brother, Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai). Just returned from drug rehab, he is subjected to urine tests by their father, Firouz (Soheil Parsa), despite his protests that he is cured. So he seems to be, although his cure takes the form of an Islamist dogma that has turned him into much more of an extremist than anyone else in his family.
That this happened so quickly is a little unlikely. We sense something unwholesome about Mehran, who incredibly hides spy cameras in the family home to keep track of Atafeh and Shireen; his interest is more voyeuristic than liturgical. One senses here a half-realized ambition by the first-time filmmaker to emulate Hitchcockian motifs, but the film never organizes Mehran's peculiarities to a particular purpose.
Firouz and wife Azar (Nasrin Pakkho) come across as reasonable parents, given their society, who want only a quick and safe marriage for their daughter. One day, Firouz takes the family to the beach, where he and Mehran go swimming, and he says to the women, "one day we can all go swimming." The implication is that he regrets the prohibition of women in bathing suits, but observes it.
The strongest message for most Western audiences will be the way the subjugation of women saturates every aspect of this society, and clearly informs even Mehran's kinkiness. Yes, but I wish Keshavarz had chosen a more low-key, everyday approach to two ordinary teenagers, and gone slowly on the lush eroticism and cinematic voyeurism.
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