Last night my family went and saw a new Persian film called “The Lizard”, a contemporary Persian comedy, which is something of an oxymoron. In the last 10 years or so, in the new wave of Persian cinema with films like “The White Balloon,” “Children of Heaven,” “Rain,” and so forth. They tend to be quite simple and beautiful films, but very melodramatic and heavy as well — and they don’t differ a whole lot from one to the next.
So when my Dad told me that we were going to see a Persian comedy, I was intrigued.
The movie centers around a burglar known as “The Lizard” for his amazing ability to scale brick walls. He gets caught early on and is thrown in prison, but manages to escape by dressing up as a mullah (Islamic leader) and walking out, fooling the guards. In his new disguise as a mullah, he gets on a train headed for northern Iran (he’s trying to leave the country) and makes up a story about how he’s going to a mosque there, but when he arrives at the border village, the villagers think that he’s the mullah that they’d sent for and adopt him, much to his dismay. So not knowing anything about Islam (he rants about Islam while in prison), he tries to adapt — often producing some pretty funny results, including one great scene with a young Islamic student who is always pestering the new “mullah” with really tedious points about the Qur’an.
My favorite of which is when this kid asks, in all seriousness about how Muslims are supposed to conduct their day and night prayers in the North Pole, where it is day half the year and night half of the year. The-Lizard-as-Mullah, completely baffled by this question waxes poetically about how there has been some debate among the Islamic clergy about this issue, and how some say that for this reason, some say that Muslims should pray according to their own time zone, and that if it were night always then some of them would have to count as day prayers. Then the kid follows up with a question about what if the people of the North Pole and the Muslims of the world should get in a war and a Muslim should be taken captive back to the North Pole — and he responds that for this reasons, some of the other clergy have said that Muslims should stay out of the North Pole — they come from warm climates anyway, why should they go to the cold?
I don’t know if that makes much sense, but I recommend this movie.
