Reading Lolita in Tehran

It loses its handle on its pacing and shows its hand far too often, but despite these formal missteps, it delivers a cross-cultural tale that is both timely and timeless.

The execution is clumsy, even didactic, but you’ll cheer as women rebel against cultural censorship and an enslaving patriarchy by reading forbidden books and spreading the word.

The most interesting aspect of this somewhat on-the-nose page-to-screen translation may be extra-textual: It is, unusually, an Israeli-Italian co-production set in Tehran, by a director, Eran Riklis, whose previous films (“Cup Final,” “Lemon Tree”) have brought the same world-weary optimism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Surely literature is a path to discovering other sensibilities, other universes; “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” by contrast, is about people essentially saying, “This book is meaningful because it reminds me of my life.”