The opening-credits sequence alone, a closeup of hands at work on mending a shoe, is more enriching than most entire movies. And the following hour and a half are loaded with no less solid information on life today in Iran, its streets, its shops, its schools, its houses. The plot premise -- a little boy loses his sister's shoes on the way home from the cobbler, and conspires with her to conceal the fact from their father -- is as simple as it is hard to sustain. Majid Majidi, the director, has much the same problem here as Jafar Panahi had in The White Balloon, a similar child's-eye view of the same little corner of the world, similarly wholesome, similarly unsaccharine. Majidi has the better solutions. The foray into a posh neighborhood (protective outer walls, locked gates, disembodied voices over the intercom), in quest of a gardening job, is a fascinating and funny digression. And the climactic long-distance race, in which the pint-sized hero tries to pace himself for the third-place prize of a pair of sneakers but instead gets swept up in a photo finish, restores any flagging interest. All throughout, the obsessive attention to shoes -- dirty ones, wet ones, slippery ones, shiny ones, dressy ones, new ones -- gives the movie a unique angle of vision, a sharply downcast angle, burdened as it is with envy, covetousness, self-consciousness, shame. Footwear in the cinema can no longer be the private domain of Luis Buñuel. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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