The Mirror

See enough Iranian cinema and you'll start to believe that we're all little children lost in a movie, or a movie within a movie, and so on. In The Mirror, Abbas Kiarostami protégé Jafar Panahi has taken the elements of his mentor's films and his own delightful The White Balloon -- a waif stymied by a mundane problem; the indifference, incompetence, and occasional malice of adult society; and the Heisenberg "mirror" of cinema -- and crafted them into a touching and politically sly if sometimes muddled fable.

As deftly established in an opening 360-degree pan of a busy intersection (Panahi has learned well from Welles's Touch of Evil), first-grader Mina (Mina Mohammad-Khani) has been left in the lurch by her mom, who fails to show up to fetch her after school. So Mina sets out on an odyssey through Teheran, little aided by clueless adults, and observing and overhearing the lives and limitations of the society around her. Much of what she encounters seems subversive -- conversations about tragic arranged marriages, a discussion between a cab driver and a liberated woman about gender roles. And after confronting an officious bus conductor who throws her off for using the men's entrance, Mina revolts. Which destroys the artifice, with mixed results -- the movie to this point has been heartwarming and wrenching, and Mohammad-Khani a charming spitfire. Despite breaking his Mirror, though, or perhaps because he does, Panahi succeeds in reflecting both a society in conflict and our own struggle to contemplate it.

-- Peter Keough