The movie opens with a dazzling cinemascope shot of night-time Tehran covered in brightly lit signs, which could be Las Vegas if not that so many are Farsi. Times have changed since then. The hook that draws you into the movie is the fantastic sense of Tehran's spaces at night, and a particular metaphysical architectural feel like you can get from de Chirico's paintings.
What the movie is actually about is having the confidence to live life even when you're living in a panopticon society where everyone disapproves of deviations from the normal.
It is a movie that has a love story, between Hashem and Taji, a taxi driver and sex worker, who bond as reluctant Samaritans when a baby is abandoned.
Will Hashem have the confidence to overcome his neighbours' disapproval, will he seize what seems like a mystical opportunity (and after all what else is life but a mystical opportunity?), a chance at hard-won happiness and belonging for all three.
The movie, when it moves into its moral predicament phase, is incredibly intimate, bringing us into embryonic family scenes that billions have faced over history (how to stop a baby crying, how to look after a baby with next to no money).
It is also a rich entry into the canon of "the city is a wolf" movies (Midnight Cowboy is another, and I got that quote from the Russian movie Brat or one of its sequels). A character opines that one of the main reasons we have institutions, is loneliness, filling a gap left by people who do not want to care or look after one another, necessary once we have so extravagantly proliferated that we have large cities to hide in. The movie is particularly astonishing when it lingers in the orphanage, showing all the wonderful terrifying babies without parents. I wonder if it prompted people to adopt after watching it?
The title of the movie is a conundrum for me, having watched it twice I still cannot marry it up with the quotation it's based on, "What the young see in a mirror, the old see in a brick". The first time I saw the movie Golestan was there and had got bored of answering the question, and I've never seen a convincing explanation. He might be saying that in life, if you're not careful, you end up being a moulded, harsh, conformist lump, and so you don't need to look into a mirror to see that, you just need to look at a brick. I raise it only to say that you can absolutely appreciate the movie without answering the riddle.
