If Only

It is almost a meta-film about the film industry, but mostly its just another excuse for some action sequences involving cars and guns and jumping off cliffs etc. Once he gets to the island it starts off on a wisecracking buddy track as Nick and Javi circle around each other, but sadly it declines into a routine 'straight-to-video' (or nowadays straight-to-streaming) flic of no great value.

It is entertaining in parts, but there's more than a touch of misogyny in the treatment of the female parts, and the cartoon CIA operatives and black clad baddies are risible. Not quite unbearable but pretty ponderous.

Strange, but again unsatisfying

It starts by concentrating on two faces, for the first few minutes we only see Marziyeh  filming herself talking to camera, then we cut to Behnaz's face for a few minutes as she is in Jafari's car heading north and they are discussing the video.

It then opens out to more conventional shots as they get near the village, but the people they encounter seem alien to my western eyes and their motives and meanings are unclear. As the truth about Marziyeh unfolds through her family and friend, Maedeh (?), we see an ancient self contained community living in what seem tumbledown homes and the incipient conflict between the pressure of the modern and the rock of community and culture.

In the end Marziyeh does 'escape' with Behnaz and Jafari - but isn't she escaping to a more gilded and less substantial cage? Perhaps this is the meaning of the unseen third face of the old pre-revolution actress who has retired to live alone and isolated in the village and who has befriended Marizyeh..