THE ACTOR



Iran, 1993, 86 min, color

Iran's leading comic Akbar Abdi plays Akbar, a comedy actor whose ambition has outgrown the shlock that made him famous. His goal is to move into more challenging work; he models himself on Charlie Chaplin. His agent, looking at the prospect of a drastically reduced cut in the star's earnings, is trying to fend off these ambitions. At home, Akbar's wife is frantic to provide him with an heir. She is so determined that Akbar should have a child that, since she appears to be sterile, she arranges for him to marry a deaf-mute gypsy girl. In one humorous scene, Akbar gets caught in a traffic jam.His fellow "jamees," on seeing him, are convinced that they are extras in one of his movies.

"Film critics hailed De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves" because he put the blame on the social conditions and not on the thieves. Later the same people judged De Sica for directing commercial films.They failed to see that De Sica himself is another "thief". In this film I have looked at an actor's situation from De Sica's point of view."