Tehran director Kamal Tabrizi's award-winning Marmoulak—The Lizard— has angered many hard-line clerics, who want people to believe that they are immune from any criminality and that their prophetic robes are sacred.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of Iran’s powerful Guardian Council -- and one of the “unelected few” President Bush attacked for preventing reform in Iran -- was furious.  He had heard one anecdote too many about the smash-hit movie Marmoulak (Lizard). A yarn about a runaway thief who disguises himself as a mullah, the film satirizes the hypocrisy and corruption of the clerical establishment and was, Jannati said, spreading “social corruption.” Crowds of young men, upon seeing a turbaned mullah on the street, were shrieking, “Marmoulak!” before running away screaming with laughter. “It is a hideous film,” Jannati said in May. “I have not seen it, but according to what I was told, it has many bad teachings and should be banned.  This film has to be confronted because such films promote social corruption in the society."

The hard-line weekly Zan-e-Rooz, or Woman of the Day, said the film encourages Iranians to disrespect clerics.

"To damage the sacredness of the respected clerical robe, there may be thousands of ways and Marmoulak shows the worst of them," the paper said in a recent editorial.

Jannati’s judgment on a film that he hadn’t seen is typical for the Iranian regime. After all, the chief film censor until 1994 was nearly blind -- a perfect real-life expression, according to Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azar Nafisi, of a “totalitarian mind-set” that tries to reshape reality and confine individuals to its limited vision of the world. Enter Marmoulak, the popularity of which had become a threat.

But the film is getting a much different reaction from audiences — it has been a box-office hit in Iran since its release in early April. Before it was banned in May, the film took the top prize at Iran’s international film festival, raked in more than $1 million, and had audiences thronging to extra late-night screenings. With its U.S. release this summer, Marmoulak has become the highest grossing Iranian film of all time.

Director Kamal Tabrizi’s movie is deceptively simple, a sort of Persian Sister Act with little of the poetic lugubriousness generally associated with Iranian cinema. Instead, the film crackles with the wily energy of its main character, who has earned his reptilian moniker for his ability to scale walls and slither out of almost every sticky situation.

“Almost” is the operative word. When the film opens, Reza Marmoulak has just been jailed for robbery. But the lifelong criminal and unbeliever sees a way out: He swipes the clothes of a kindly prison cleric and goes on the lam. Or tries to. In a funny scene that conveys Iranians’ growing disenchantment with the powerful clerical class, Marmoulak flaps around in his robes and howls, “Damn your soul!” at the stream of taxis that refuse to stop for a mullah.

Trying to leave Iran illegally to Europe, Reza lands in a village near the Turkish border wearing the cleric's stolen robes and discovers the benefits available to clergy in Iran, a Shiite Muslim state ruled by a hard-line religious establishment. Waiting at the train station are a group of anxious locals expecting a cleric to lead prayers for elderly villagers. Not knowing the real cleric died in a car crash, they welcome the thief. 

At first, Marmoulak engages in plenty of impious behavior -- leering, wet-eyed, at young ladies, whispering “sssssou sssssou” to cover up the fact that he doesn’t know his prayers. But after he becomes the mullah of a village mosque, he starts believing his own sermons, which revolve around a phrase uttered by the prison’s mullah moments before Marmoulak pilfered his robes: “There are as many ways to reach God as there are people.” Marmoulak proves to be popular, capturing hearts through his simplicity and making fun of strict religious interpretations of Islam.   More and more followers cram into the once-abandoned mosque to hear their mulllah’s hilarious yet resonant rambles.  During Reza's short life as a cleric, he discovers God:  decrying the top-down imposition of belief, challenges notions that Islam is only for the learned or the purely good, and advocating for the doing of good deeds over the policing of minute aspects of individuals’ behavior. And with this, Marmoulak suggests the possibility of a people’s Islam that is more responsive to, and reflective of, its followers, a religion that isn’t willfully blind to how Iranians may interpret their faith and imagine themselves.  That, of course, isn’t the predominant Islam in Iran today, as the fact of the film’s banning makes clear. And things seem to be getting worse.

Seven years ago, the newly elected President Mohammed Khatami offered the promise of reform, and millions of Iranians embraced that hope. But this year, droves of disillusioned voters, disappointed both by Khatami’s inability to stand up to the country’s conservatives and by the slow pace of reform, skipped February’s parliamentary election. Conservatives swept the polls, began tightening their control, and continued locking horns with the United States over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But all hope is not lost for internal democratic evolution in Iran. How else to explain the popularity of a movie that offers up a radical image of self-salvation to its Iranian audience, people who have been failed by countless political messiahs and foreign interlopers throughout their history?

Marmoulak is a film that breaks plenty of taboos in clergy-ruled Iran, but despite its satirical tone, but some clerics have been satisfied with the film's ending, in which the thief-turned-cleric undergoes a moral transformation by finding God and turns himself in to the authorities. Even so, Iran's Culture Ministry, controlled by reformers, permitted the film to be screened after extensive censorship.

Marmoulak ends on the birthday of the last Imam Mahdi, a savior whose return is eagerly awaited by Iran’s Shia believers. Marmoulak’s adopted village is strewn with lights; his followers are waiting in their mosque. Tabrizi takes his audience into the scene in a masterful point-of-view shot: One by one the worshippers turn around and look directly into the camera as it advances through the mosque. Who is walking in? Whom are they looking at so expectantly? Their mock mullah, the sinner turned salt-of-the-earth saint? Imam Mahdi himself? The audience? Or perhaps some version of all three -- regular Iranians like themselves who, the film seems to say, also have the power to understand God, and to make their world a closer reflection of the heaven they imagine.