The Mirror

Not since Shirley Temple ruled the box office have adorable moppets been in such vogue in…well, not Hollywood. No, the new champion of sagas about put-upon cherubs is Iran, as evidenced in such recent gems as The Color of Paradise (VL Online), Children of Heaven (VL-9/99), and The Mirror director Jafar Panahi's earlier The White Balloon (VL-1/97). The plot of The Mirror is simplicity itself: a young Iranian girl (Mina Mohammad-Khani) walks out of her school prepared to meet her mother as usual, only to experience a bracing shock (as in: "o mother, where art thou?"). Beginning with the extremely busy four-way intersection in front of the school, our wee Odysseus embarks on a harrowing journey trying to find her way home, full of missed turns, wrong buses, and would-be helpful strangers whose sincere efforts are somewhat stymied by our heroine's extremely imprecise knowledge of where she actually lives. About halfway through this charming tale, however, the meaning of the title (which will be readily apparent to every student of M.H. Abram's classic lit crit treatise The Mirror and the Lamp on the relationship between art and reality) suddenly becomes apparent as the film abruptly shifts in an altogether different (and, to me, problematic) direction. Still, considering the sizable critical attention that Iranian film has garnered in the past five or six years, this will readily find an audience and is a strong optional purchase. (R. Pitman)[DVD Review--March 22, 2005--Kino, 95 min., in Farsi w/English subtitles, not rated, $29.95--Making its debut on DVD, 1998's The Mirror is presented with a good very good widescreen transfer with a text director bio/filmography. Bottom line: still an uneven film, this is a strong optional purchase for larger foreign collections.]