They didn’t raise their fists, they didn’t shout in the streets, but their principled stance made its mark. In all times, throughout history and across lands, women have resisted power with gentle, often invisible and yet formidably effective resistance.

During World War II, French embroiderers hid messages in their knitting that were destined for the Resistance. In 2003, Liberian women organized a sex strike to end the civil war in that country. Domestic servants learned to read in secret, defying the social code of silence in the Victorian era. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo defied the dictatorship by marching wordlessly with photos of their missing children; this was Argentina. In the United States, before Rosa Parks, Black women boycotted buses without slogans or shouts.

In “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” currently appearing in theaters, revolt in 1980 Iran takes the form of a book read, a veil removed, a story shared, or a few dance steps to better understand “Jane Austen.” Everything is done discreetly, behind closed doors. By reclaiming their voice through reading and debate, a book club of women says no—calmly but radically. They join this long line of figures of silent insubordination.

In this film adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s autobiographical tale by Eran Riklis (“Lemon Tree,” 2008), literature is not merely an escape, but also a political act. In revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic theocracy replaced the Pahlavi monarchy, and as the newly-installed Islamic regime began imposing rules that transformed public spaces into places of censorship and oppression, particularly for women, this relatable but flawed film shows how a book club became a bastion of freedom.

“Lolita” captures the suffocating atmosphere of Tehran in 1980—hard not to notice, with bitterness, that things haven’t changed much, and in 2025, people inside and outside Iran protest the same things they called out then: an inept government high-jacked by backward and corrupt clerics and the useless and demeaning Islamic edicts they wield to remain in power.

In 1980, where the film is set, the streets were patrolled by the Bassij, dress codes imposed, books were banned, and students were imprisoned and sometimes tortured. But it is within this asphyxiated atmosphere that the film finds its shallow beauty: a living room, a few young women, a passionate humanities teacher and literary works that have become verboten under Islamic rule. It is there, in this enclosed yet vibrant space, where the banner of resistance is unfurled.

At the heart of the film is Nabokov’s “Lolita.” The parallel is a chilling but accurate one. The Lolita of the novel is a young girl deprived of her voice, reduced to an object of desire and narration by a man who speaks in her place. In the Iran of the mullahs, women suffer comparable dispossession: their bodies, thoughts and voices are held hostage by the patriarchy. By restoring Lolita’s humanity through critical reading, the students reclaim their voices and reconstruct themselves.

Other significant works are added, “The Great Gatsby,” where appearances matter more than truth; “Madame Bovary,” in which female desire is extinguished by norms. In each text, the young women find echoes of their own condition. They don’t read to understand the characters, but to connect with themselves.

Why “The Great Gatsby”? The character Gatsby, entirely focused on an illusory quest for an idealized past, recalls the tension between personal aspiration and social reality. Characters like Daisy Buchanan are of particular interest: a woman trapped in her role in a world where she can only exist through men embodies the dilemma between desire and conformity. Like Buchanan, many young women must balance their desire for independence with the pressure of a system that dictates how they love, and exist.

Emma Bovary becomes an ambivalent but powerful figure for these women in search of meaning. She’s trapped in stuffy, provincial life and seeks love in novels; the imagination is her escape from the mediocrity of everyday life. For Azar Nafisi’s students (Nafisi is played by Golshifteh Farahani), it is not so much Emma’s morality or tragic fate that matters, but her hankering for beauty, freedom, and passion, urges that the regime forbids them from expressing. Emma thus becomes the symbol of a feminine desire stifled by a rigid society, just as they themselves are in Tehran.

Through these readings, a dialogue develops between the fictional heroines and the readers. This critical approach to Western literature becomes a gentle act of subversion, a way of saying that women’s emotions, dreams, and aspirations cannot be contained within ideological bounds.

This quest also involves the body. Clothing in society becomes language. In public, the chador is mandatory; in the privacy of the living room, hair is revealed, beauty radiates, and individualities unfold. Removing the veil, in this context, is not a trivial gesture for these women: it is an act of insubordination, a taking back of their space, a reclaiming of their bodies.

But it is above all in the connection between reading and exile that the film has something to say. For these women, reading means traveling without a passport, inhabiting other lives when their own was confiscated. Azar Nafisi, who tells this story from her exile in America, shows how imagination can become a first step toward freedom.

In spite of its ambition, “Reading Lolita in Tehran” misses the mark. Absent a sense of urgency, a genuine awareness of the perils in that beautiful but expressionless face of hers, an opaque performance by Golshifteh Farahani keeps “Lolita” from reaching its potential. The only film that could not have existed without her is 2012’s “The Patience Stone,” directed by Atiq Rahimi; she was indispensable in that role.