Curl Power (2024)

Curl Power

God’s operations are puzzling, or at least that is the argument of THE LIZARD, a spicy comedy that really makes me wonder if Frank Capra isn’t alive and well in Iran.

Reza (played by Parviz Parastui with a beautifully deadpan sense of humor) is our hero, who is a petty thief known as The Lizard. He got this nickname because he could climb the steepest walls a skill which has given him a long criminal record behind him and an eternity’s worth of jail time ahead.

Reza’s warden greets him to prison by telling him that he isn’t there for punishment but for redemption; he will make sure Reza gets to heaven. In the meantime, Reza’s good deeds (such as rescuing a dove from barbed wire) will be punished with solitary confinement; and his bad deeds will be dealt with in such a way so as to make one question what exactly the warden means by justice.

Believing his future hopeless, convinced religion is a joke, Reza tries to kill himself landing himself in an outside hospital room next to another prisoner named Reza: this one happens to be a mullah who quotes not from the Koran but Saint-Exupery’s classic “The Little Prince.” There’s something about this mullah his rough hands and unassuming manner that touches Reza, but not enough to keep him from stealing the other man’s religious robes and making a break for it before they can send him back to prison.

Reza manages through some quick thinking and street smarts acquired over many years on the wrong side of the law even when luck would have it that he take over management of a falling-apart mosque and its motley congregation while trying to hide out from police Reza still manages to pass himself off as just another mullah until fate catches up with him. In fact, when people see the robes and the turban, they don’t think anything of it.

More than that: they find his oddities endearing. They are even more charmed when he answers theological conundrums with common sense and in language that everyone can understand. It would seem that not being bound by dogmatic orthodoxy has its benefits, as does the Socratic method of asking one’s flock what they think.

If there is an ethical problem with him saying during a sermon that there are many ways to God; and using the example of getting into a house either through key or lockpick or over-wall climbing then I am sorry but I do not see it. The congregation is inspired to be better human beings; Reza himself gets a little inspired too, seeing how much good he can do around him once people start respecting him for who he really is instead of what they assume based on appearances alone.

Compassion towards their characters which can be expected from anything that controls the universe is what Tabrizi and screenwriter Peyman Ghassemkhani demonstrate. They can be foolish, especially those two young men who attach themselves to Reza and ask him questions such as how one should pray in outer space; but they are not idiots. Their silliness only serves to show that god or fate or whatever has a wicked sense of humor in this world.

If God didn’t want us to have fun, why would He give us so many tools for making mischief? Asks Reza of one such acolyte suffering from doubt. It’s this attitude that got the film banned in several Iranian cities by the more traditional clerics that the movie spoofs so gently and it’s a different attitude that made it a box-office hit in others.

What makes all of this wonderful is its ecumenicalism. Whereas the religion here is Islam and the clergy involved is a mullah, the theology could apply to any system which advocates for good over evil. The kind of spirituality beyond any particular theological framework which Tabrizi preaches through Reza might have landed him in same prison where Reza was held by Iranian authorities twenty years ago (or thereabouts) under current regime instead of merely being censored.

I really liked watching such movies because they share secret about enlightenment without quoting scriptures directly or waving religious books around (although some people consider ‘The Little Prince’ as one). In fact none of them are thumped but dangled before our eyes like delicious fruit; so just as lizard respects its characters, likewise does it respect audience by not serving up only moral lessons on plate. Instead he asks his viewers to think for themselves now that’s radical anywhere!

Watch Curl Power For Free On Gomovies.