Snake Fang

Since Khomeini's death, Iranian cinema has regained a lot of its former energy and unpredictability, producing movies like this bizarre mixture of frontier western and neo-realist drama. A middle-aged intellectual, poleaxed by the deaths of his mother and brother (the latter in the Iran-Iraq war), takes up residence in a seedy hotel room that he shares with a swaggering black marketeer, and gets a crash course in low-life realities. The mood of post-war anomie and desolation is caught strongly, and the director (who has twelve other features to his credit) has a keen eye for the details of crime and violence. The climactic plot twists made very little sense to me, but maybe you had to be there to understand.