A Tehran couple Leyla and Kaveh drive about a mountain region somewhere in Iran and offer bags of money to the poor people they encounter in return for these folks carrying out actions that increase in inappropriateness.
The thing I thing that struck me most about Modest Reception was the way in which it went against my pre-conceived ideas about Iran. It surprised me that a film with such immoral central characters would have been permitted to have been made there in the first place. My ignorance I admit. Secondly, the way the female character Leyla was portrayed was much unexpected. She was very liberated and assertive. She was the one who did the driving, she was more than a match for her husband in the fiery insults and she looked quite atypical in her cool little feminine woollen hat. My ignorance at work once again obviously. But it just goes to show that the perception of Iran from a western perspective can be somewhat skewered.
The star and director Mani Haghighi said that there was no real message to the film and that people have interpreted all kinds of allegorical meanings into the narrative; which he found a little tedious. It is an odd film and I certainly felt I was probably missing something, in terms of overall understanding. But perhaps there isn't as much to understand as you imagine. Maybe it is simply a strange and surreal tale about a couple who decide to rock the boat a bit to see what will happen.
