'Secret Ballot'

Rock the vote?

A BALLOT BOX is air-dropped at dawn into the safekeeping of a soldier (Cyrus Abidi) who stands watch in a sleepy provincial backwater of Iran. The package represents the gift of democracy delivered from on high. It's a simultaneously absurd and ominous image and altogether fitting for the start of this wise and winsome comedy by Iranian writer-director Babak Payami. Fast on the heels of the box comes an agent from Tehran (Nassim Abdi) to collect local votes for a national election. But, in the first of a series of colliding worldviews that make up the film, the soldier declares himself loathe to cooperate since the agent is a woman. The bustling bureaucrat quickly pulls rank, however, enlisting the soldier's help (and his jeep) in making herself available to would-be voters across the parched, thinly populated vistas of Kish Island in the Persian Gulf. She coaxes votes from the more recalcitrant, who seem unaware they are living in a democracy, by exhorting the virtues of representative government (while the soldier, to her horror, helpfully proffers his gun). But the people on the ground react unpredictably to these modern urban ideas. One old-timer, who happily succumbs to her arguments for voting, can find no better candidate to write in than Allah. Musing on the competing allegiances to God, the gun, and the ballot, Payami unsettles glib notions of "progress" and instead explores the complexity of change and exchange in contemporary Iran. He's too shrewd to endorse any of those jockeying authorities outright, preferring to show the weaknesses of each in the foibles of their somewhat ridiculous spokespersons. In the unlikely friendship that quietly blossoms between the soldier and the bureaucrat, the film hints at the decidedly human dimension to all social change. (Robert Avila)