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Domestic tranquillity is hard to find in ‘Fireworks Wednesday’

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Hediyeh Tehrani in Asghar Farhadi’s “Fireworks Wednesday.”Courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Those who work as temp domestics — housecleaners and the like — have a tough life in the films of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi.

In his "A Separation" (2011), winner of a best foreign language film Oscar, a needy mother finds herself in the middle of the title marital crisis of an upper-class couple when she takes a job as caregiver to a dementia patient.

Farhadi's most recently released film in the United States, "Fireworks Wednesday" (2006), is another complex and magnificently acted melodrama revived from his back catalog for belated export. In it, Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti), a working-class bride-to-be, ends up in the middle of the title marital spat.

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She appears in a throwaway opening scene riding with her fiance on a motorbike and her chador gets caught up in the spokes of a wheel. The bike topples, sending them sprawling. How those old traditions get in the way of post-modern day progress! But before you can say Isadora Duncan she and her betrothed are laughing and throwing snowballs at each other.

This chador, which pops up a few more times as both symbol and plot device, is of less interest than the woman wearing it. Playful, innocent, and malleable, Rouhi serves as the film's central but shifting point of view. Like the child protagonist in Henry James's novel "What Maisie Knew," she becomes a not entirely comprehending witness to and pawn of the adults.

She arrives in medias mess. Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad), barking on the phone and with a bandaged hand, points to the debris and advises her to put on slippers because of the glass from a broken window.

Rouhi doesn't get a lot of cleaning work done. But she does help out various sides in the dispute. Morteza leaves and his wife, Mojde (Hediyeh Tehrani), enters. First she pays Rouhi and dismisses her, then she brings her back and has her make an appointment with — and spy on — Simin (Pantea Bahram), a divorcee who runs a beauty salon. Delighted to be involved in intrigue — and get her eyebrows done — Rouhi agrees.

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Piecing together the mystery proves a more difficult task than cleaning the apartment. The biggest question is whether Rouhi can finish the job with her innocence intact, even as she learns that nice people are sometimes guilty.

½
FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY

Directed by Asghar Farhadi. Written by Farhadi and Mani Haghighi. Starring Hamid Farokhnezhad, Hediyeh Tehrani, Taraneh Alidoosti, Pantea Bahram. At Kendall Square. 102 minutes. Unrated (bleak outlook on marriage). In Persian, with subtitles.


Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.