Synopsis

A wild comedy of marital discord filmed with Makhmalbaf's inimitable visual flair, THE ACTOR features an odd love triangle.

Pudgy Akbar Abdi plays a popular film actor who has grown wealthy from appearing in mindless commercial comedies, although he longs to make serious art films like his idol, Charlie Chaplin.

Akbar and his melancholy wife Simin (Fatemeh Motamed-Aria) live in a startling post-modern home furnished with the latest in high-tech gadgetry.



Simin becomes increasingly obsessed with her inablilty to have a child and insists that Akbar should take a second wife, a mute waif of a gypsy girl (Mahaya Petrossian), who will disappear after being well paid for providing them with an infant.

In his feature follow up to Once Upon a Time, Cinema, Mohsen Makhmalbaf continues the cinematic horseplay with a contemporary, semitragic farce about a burly film actor who wants to play only in art films but is forced by his familys economic demands to act in a string of trashy commercial movies.

The Actor is a comic allegory about the rift between traditional and contemporary Iran, in which class differences and cultural differences are equally pertinent (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader).

Cast: Akbar Abdi, Fatemah Motamed-Arya, Mahaya Petrosian, Azita Hajian, Hamideh Kheirabadi, Hossein Panahi, Mohamad Reza Sharifinia, Parvin Soleimani