Aida Mohammadkhani makes a child’s stubbornness funny without making it cute. In The White Balloon, she keeps us close to Razieh while letting her be unreasonable; it is a performance worth seeking out.
Fi1m perspective
Razieh wants a goldfish, and sees no reason why anybody else should have more pressing business. In The White Balloon (1995), Aida Mohammadkhani gives that wish the full force of a child’s concentration, without suggesting that she knows how funny it looks. The adults are to take her seriously, and so are we. We laughed at her insistence, then grew anxious for her in the streets, because she makes the errand feel urgent even when the demands are unreasonable. It is a fine performance, with none of the reassurance of a child trying to be liked.
The assurance of that performance is striking given that The White Balloon was her screen debut. She followed it with a small number of Iranian film and television appearances in the mid-to-late 1990s, including Raaz-e Mina (Mina’s Secret) (1996). Her acting credits largely cease after that decade. She later appears as herself in the documentary And, Towards Happy Alleys (2023).
Jafar Panahi directs from a screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami, giving Mohammadkhani room to hold our attention through the small obstacles. Her expressive face and unforced delivery suit his patient attention to everyday encounters. That patience occasionally becomes a problem: the film leaves us waiting longer than we need to, and she cannot make every pause necessary. But she keeps Razieh’s wish clear without reducing her to a single appealing trait. We understand her determination without being obliged to applaud it.
What matters in Razieh is that Mohammadkhani allows her to be difficult without making that difficulty her whole character. The comedy comes from taking the goldfish seriously, and the worry depends on our coming to take it seriously too. Panahi gets the balance right by allowing us to stay with a child whose certainty can exhaust our patience. Start with The White Balloon, and allow for its occasional stretches of waiting.
Biography
Aida Mohammadkhani is an Iranian actress and neuroscientist. She made her acting debut at the age of seven as Razieh in Jafar Panahi's The White Balloon (1995), a role that brought her international recognition.
She appeared in a small number of further Iranian films and television productions in the 1990s, including Mina's Secret (1996) and Ebrahim (1996). Mohammadkhani later pursued academic studies, earning a master's degree in clinical psychology and a PhD in cognitive neurosciences. She has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary.
