RIDICULING THE REGIME:

Iran’s own Father Ted angers clerics but draws in cinemagoers (Dan De Luce, 16 May 2004, Sunday Herald)

Flirting with young women and breaking into houses, Reza is not the sort of figure Iran’s clerical regime would like to celebrate. But he’s rapidly turning into a folk hero.

The Lizard is a comic film that tells the story of Reza, a thief who escapes prison by posing as a cleric. Well on the way to becoming the most popular movie in Iranian history, The Lizard is shown at 2am to meet demand, and cinemas are still having to turn away customers.

To an outsider the film seems tame and hardly an attack on the country’s powerful clergy, but for Iran’s theocratic regime, the film is akin to producing Father Ted in the Middle Ages. Satire of the clerical establishment is the ultimate taboo in a country that grants clergy near-absolute power. They decide what clothes women can wear, what programmes television can broadcast and what books Iranians can buy. [...]

President Mohammad Khatami’s reformist government may have approved the film for screening, but hardliners in and outside the clergy are outraged that such satire has received legal sanction.

“The movie is part of a series of efforts to weaken the Islamic system and the clerical establishment, and the judiciary must confront such measures,” wrote the daily Jomhuri Islami, an ultra-conservative newspaper.