Tehran. It is Iranian New Year, and the 7-year old girl Razieh wants to buy a new goldfish for herself, but her mother is against it. Her brother Ali persuades mother to give Razieh a 500 toman banknote to buy herself the goldfish, anyway. On her way, Razieh stops at a gathering of people around a snake charmer, who takes her money thinking it is to pay for his act, but since the girl protests, he gives her the banknote back again. At the shop, Razieh realizes that the fish she wants is 200 toman, not 100, and that she lost the banknote again. She and Ali spot the banknote at the bottom of a grate of a closed store. They ask the neighboring clerk to help, but he cannot reach the banknote with a rod. Finally, an Afghan boy selling white balloons uses his stick and a bubble gum to get the banknote, but Razieh and Ali just leave without saying anything.
Jafar Panahi's feature length debut film as a director is a gentle, simple, unobtrusive, touching and honest little film, though he is not able to keep the interest of the viewers to the fullest in the rather overstretched second half. Panahi is the best when he presents small, humorous 'slice-of-life' moments that are small, but somehow have a big impact on the positive impression of the storyline: in one of them, the heroine Razieh wants to buy a goldfish for New Year, but her brother Ali protests because they already have fish in their pond. Razieh replies at that: "You call these goldfish, you haven't seen the others! It's as though they're dancing when they move their fins!" In a neat directorial intervention, their father (who is never seen, but only heard off-screen) hits a bowl she is holding in the pond with a soap, complaining at Ali: "I tell you shampoo and you come back with soap!" Another neat intervention is that the story plays almost in real time: the film's running time is 1 hour and 22 minutes, and in the opening a radio announcer is heard saying: "1 hour and 22 minutes until New Year". This is repeated two more times in the film, the last one being when they say: "44 minutes until New Year", which is congruent with the remaining time of the "White Balloon". Unfortunately, the last 40 minutes are just spent on the two kids sitting above the grate, trying to figure out how to get the banknote under it, which tends to slow the movie down way too much. A 10-minute sequence where a soldier sits to talk to the girl, for instance, leads nowhere and is somewhat boring. Curiously, the film's theme is not about the innocence of the kids, as some thought, but about something else: the inconsiderate nature of society. Throughout the film, Razieh is ignored by her mother, by the snake charmer and by the store owner, all of whom are preoccupied with themselves. This comes full circle when Razieh and Ali themselves just take the help of an Afghan boy and leave him alone without even saying thanks, thereby becoming inconsiderate themselves, signalling how even the weaker ones of the weak are always brushed off on the margins.
Grade:++
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