On demand: "The White Balloon"

Hailing from the era when Iranian filmmakers were centring children in a bid to circumvent the censors, 1995's The White Balloon is a gem-like anecdote, chiselled out by Abbas Kiarostami (credited screenwriter), polished up by Jafar Panahi (Kiarostami's former assistant, making his feature directorial debut at a moment when he could still roam the streets without restriction). You could - and probably should - teach the economy of the first movement, which in a series of crisply congruent shots lays out both the route by which a seven-year-old girl (Aida Mohammedkhani) and her mother (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy) return home from shopping, and the exact status of this family's constituent parts. Patriarch: gruff, demanding, offscreen, heard but never seen. Mother: generous but harassed and distracted. Daughter: relentless in her quest for a plumper goldfish to serve as the centrepiece of the traditional New Year's celebrations. On one level, the latter is intended as no more nor less than a representative Iranian girl, but Kiarostami and Panahi invite alternative readings of this moppet: as a consumer who's never happy with what she's got, to the extent she will drift into the waiting, greased-and-greasy palms of grifters and crooks; as an innocent who hasn't yet learned the rules of society, and so thinks nothing of transgressing them; and, perhaps most resonantly, as a fellow artist, who knows exactly what she wants but struggles to find the means to pay for it, and often finds others standing obstructively in her way. The setting is markedly different from the films that preceded it, the milieu now more comfortable, in as much as anything about contemporary Iranian society might be considered comfortable. Yet The White Balloon, though outwardly couched as a family film, proves just as self-reflexive as Close-Up, Where is My Friend's House? or the later The Wind Will Carry Us.

It gets there by means of a sly subterfuge. Though the girl is established as the obvious focal point and point of viewer identification, The White Balloon is really a running commentary on the character of everybody else we see on screen: the unscrupulous traders, the dismissive pet shop owner, the overworked tailor, the thoughtless scooter drivers, the good Samaritan prepared only to go so far. Once again, we bear witness to the great virtue of late 20th century Iranian cinema: simple interactions - and sparse dialogues, in this case between characters who spend a good stretch of the running time sitting on a grille at the side of the road - which click together like mosaic tiles or those opening shots into a gradually all-encompassing picture. As Kiarostami and Panahi saw it in 1995, neither this system not this society is functioning as it should; as a result, even a transaction as notionally simple as buying a goldfish turns into a protracted obstacle course, with no guarantee of the desired outcome at the end of it. The ending to this secular parable is deliberately left open, more mysterious than conventionally happy; that's why it stays with you so. (In its own way, it is a gift as great as any goldfish: something to take home and let swim around inside your head.) On the verge of tears throughout yet driven by a single-minded determination to see her mini-mission through, Mohammedkhani is a picture of constancy, resolve and resilience in what surely has to be one of the all-time great child performances, all the more impressive for seeming to understand and embody ideas altogether greater than her pipsqueak self. By my reckoning, she must now be in her mid-thirties; we can only wonder whether Iranian society is working out any better for her today.

The White Balloon is currently available to stream via YouTube.