This film falls short of its rich source material. It wants to be about literary freedom, gender oppression, and political resistance but only skims the surface of all three. Moments that should hit hard—intimate scenes of women reading Lolita as part of an “underground” book club—feel underdeveloped, stilted. The intellectual back-and-forth between Nafisi and her students, which should be the heart of the story, often feels clumsy.
Seems like a direction issue. The film rushes through ideas (“I am thirty-five…
