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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Radio Dreams will make you tune in

RADIO DREAMS (Babak Jalali). 94 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (June 23). See listing. Rating: NNN


Not much happens in Babak Jalali’s Radio Dreams, but that’s all right. This is a comedy of gentle chaos you just sort of coast along with it, smiling and occasionally chuckling.

Although it was shot in San Francisco, director/co-writer Jalali’s follow-up to his 2009 debut, Frontier Blues, is performed almost entirely in Farsi, with some English and a little Abyssinian. 

It’s set at fictional Farsi-language PARS-FM, where beleaguered program director Hamid (Mohsen Namjoo) – an Iranian author and poet living in exile who’s somehow ended up running a radio station in northern California – spends the day awaiting a visit from Metallica.

The band is supposed to jam with a trio of Kabul rockers who show up very early and must sit around the shabby conference room while Hamid battles the inflexible Maral (Boshra Dastournezhad), daughter of distracted station owner Mr. Afshar (Keyumars Hakim), over money, ad placement and bass guitars.

Jalali and co-writer Aida Ahadiany give everything a charming, slightly shopworn vibe that echoes the early works of Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch and or Aki Kaurismäki – movies similarly concerned with people struggling to assert their cultural identity in uncaring surroundings and which found deadpan comedy in the minutiae of human interaction. Namjoo, an Iranian folksinger making a rare venture into acting, is a delight to watch, his exasperation growing both funnier and sadder from one scene to the next.

A subplot about Mr. Afshar’s obsession with wrestling feels like it’s there to nudge the script to feature length, but it does deliver one decent laugh.

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