BALLOON STORY

By RICHARD CORLISS

WHAT COULD BE POLITICALLY incendiary about a sweet little Iranian movie that tells the story of a small girl looking for some lost money? Not a thing. Yet Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon has become the victim of an international skirmish over the U.S.'s alleged efforts to destabilize Iran. That country's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has announced that The White Balloon, submitted as Iran's entry in the foreign-language category of the Oscars, was being withdrawn. In response, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said it would not allow a film to be squeezed out because of politics. The White Balloon remains eligible.

The Academy screening committee is in for a treat, for the film is fresh and beguiling. Seven-year-old Razieh (Aida Mohammakhani) is determined to buy a pretty white "dancing" goldfish she saw in a nearby shop. Reluctantly, her mother gives Razieh a 500-toman note, but the little girl loses the money. It has fallen into a sewer grate, tantalizingly out of reach. In dramatizing her efforts to get the money back, the film shows that no one can want anything as much as a child does. No one can be so desperate, endearing, selfish. Razieh is a maven of curb-level politics, a born haggler. She'd be a demon at any yard sale.

Panahi, formerly an assistant to Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (who did the script for The White Balloon), labors under a far more censorious burden than any Hollywood director. Yet his sly comedy is wonderfully open to life's coincidences and consequences; it shows an uncondescending interest in children even as it is alert to their gamin guile. His film deserves viewers, supporters--perhaps even a statuette.

--By Richard Corliss