|||||| The Planet of Great Moviez ||||||||: Marmoulak

مارمولک Marmoulak
Iran 2004 | Farsi | English & French & Arabic Subtitle (.sub) | 111 min | H.264 688x400 | 939 kb/s | 747 MB | Comedy | RS.com

Arrested during his latest armed robbery professional con man Reza cannot bear his imprisonment and finds a way to escape disguised as a clergyman. But when he accidentally becomes the prayer leader of a small town mosque, things get really tough. On the surface, Marmoulak (which means lizard in Farsi) appears as a social satire poking fun at the clergy in Iran, but the film's deeper message is in Reza's discovery of the true meaning faith and charity.

IMDB

A satirical snipe at the life of Iran's clergy, "Marmoulak" ("The Lizard"), has become a box office hit here after only narrowly making it through the Islamic republic’s scissor-wielding censors. Director Kamal Tabrizi's film begins with a daring prison escape by convicted thief and anti-hero Reza, jailed for life for being caught one too many times. Injured in a prison brawl and sent to the infirmary, Reza finds the robes and turban of a cleric and slips out of jail undetected. He then discovers the benefits of life as a holy man in the northwestern holy city of Mashhad, and keeps up his charade. What happens next is a moral transformation - the one aspect of the film that could at least please the most hardened clerics. After preaching in prisons and even at weekly Friday prayers where worshippers become captivated by his simplicity, Reza becomes a respected religious figure and a man who finds God himself. But there is also an underlying criticism of the men of the cloth who have ruled Iran for the past 25 years. Firstly, Reza's easy-going style - including sexually suggestive jokes and even speaking of "brother (Quentin) Tarantino," the US film director - brings people flooding back to the mosques. Coupled with this is the message that God and the various interpretations of the Koranic message are accessible to all - even a convicted thief who should under Islamic law have his hand cut off. If the film has one message, Tabrizi says, it is to say to the clergy that in order to survive and to maintain their contact with the people, they should accept criticism." The censors certainly had a hard time getting their heads around the film, forcing a one-month delay in its public screening - so its premiere would not be in the holy months of Moharam and Safar - and prompting rumours that the movie might even be canned altogether. According to press reports, the head of the hardline Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, even watched the film twice and ordered a special committee be set up to give its opinion. Finally the committee gave the green light for the film to go on show, albeit minus some of its more controversial dialogue deemed too shocking for some of the harder men of the cloth. Now being screened in 18 cinema halls across the sprawling capital and benefiting from weeks of hype in the local press, already a box office smash, it won the best film award at the recent Fajr Film Festival in Tehran. "The reception is excellent, as it was predicted," said one cinema manager in the north of the city. Several halls reported selling out five days in advance. The Iran Daily newspaper said several theatres were offering extra late-night screenings to keep up with demand, amid speculation that "The Lizard" could become one of the most commercially successful Iranian films of all time. Critics have also pointed to the film's more refreshing, accessible style - a far cry from the more highbrow and often surreal offerings of internationally acclaimed directors Abbas Kiarostami or Mohsen Makhmalbaf, directors who have scored with foreign festival goers but not a large chunk of the Iranian public.