About a third of the way through the long, long flashback that is Crimson Gold, someone mentions that the main character, Hussein, needs to work outdoors because of his claustrophobia. It's a throwaway comment--but like every other detail that's doled out in the film, it makes your stomach drop, as if the quicksand around you had given way another inch. Why hadn't you seen from the start that Hussein couldn't bear confinement? It should have been obvious from the first scene--the one where he died by his own hand, having botched the robbery of a jewelry store.

You think back to that beginning, or rather end, which was played out in a narrow, darkened space defined on the far side by a barred security gate and on the near side by the awkward, blubbery silhouette of Hussein himself. For something like four minutes, or eternity, this opening shot of Crimson Gold had kept you trapped with Hussein, by Hussein, while the camera's sole movement was a slow push forward, squeezing the lens toward the body, the body toward the bars. At last the only air left was outside, in an unattainable little slice of the Tehran streets. People on the sidewalk were milling about and shouting, since the store's owner (unseen by you) was already dead on the floor. Then, at the moment of maximum compression, Hussein's ski mask came off; his hand lifted toward the shadowed head, holding a pistol.

So--Hussein had been claustrophobic! If you think of Crimson Gold as a series of explanations for a desperate crime, then you might dismiss the film (wrongly, I think) as just another late-neorealist weepie: the portrait of an abject prisoner of circumstance. But it seems to me that the movie is concerned both with the shackles on Hussein and with the freedom of the more affluent people around him, audience members included. The deeper mystery of the film--for which Crimson Gold offers no easy solution--is that every new piece of information we get about Hussein turns out to be something we might have known.

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