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Someone on the IMDb wrote that this was “a third-world feminist North by Northwest.” Kinda but not quite. What it is is a slice of life for underclass women in modern Iran; we float between different stories as women of different ages suffer different mishigoss. As an expose of a social problem (“You want to buy a bus ticket without a male escort? Unheard of!”) it is effective, as a movie it is okay. I’ll say this: if the women were white and speaking English and it would look and feel like science fiction. Don’t celebrate too quickly that this film is at least confronting its own country’s medievalism — it was banned in Iran.