A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it seemed to have a decent reputation (it is included in the ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ list, among other things), I was quite eager to check it out. Well, it turned out to be an extremely minimalistic feature, it’s basically about a young child who wants to buy a goldfish and loses her money and, well, it was pretty much it. It was apparently done on purpose as Jafar Panahi wanted to display that you didn’t necessarily need millions of dollars to shoot a movie. Anyway, I always had a weak spot for such minimalistic features and this one was definitely pretty neat. Indeed, the end-result felt like a mix of Italian neorealism (I’m pretty sure that ‘Ladri di biciclette’ was a huge influence on this movie) with a nail-biting thriller and this mix worked really well. To be honest, it did feel strange, even quite terrifying, to see such a young kid wandering around in the streets on her own, that’s something you simply don’t do in Western countries nowadays (Maybe did we use to do it as well back then 40-50 years ago though?). However, there was one thing that bothered with this movie and it was the fact that this little girl was just so damned annoying. Sure, I know her portrayal was actually accurate, my ex-girlfriend had a young daughter around the same age and she displayed a very similar behavior. Still, it didn’t change the fact that her behavior was borderline cringe-inducing, especially when she was endlessly nagging her mother to give her some money to buy some goldfish, which was even more annoying when you think that they already had some perfectly fine goldfishes at home. Anyway, to conclude, even if I wasn’t completely sold, it was still a solid watch though and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.