A sardonic comedy on the home life of a film star, and on the home that cinema has made in the life of the people. The Actor begins with a marvelous tearful monologue by Iran's king of comedy, Akbar Abdi. He plays, well, Iran's king of comedy, a man who would be Charlie Chaplin but is reduced to a schlock Oliver Hardy. Akbar lives with his wife, Simin, in an ultra-modern house that Jacques built (Tati, that is), each movie-postered wall opening mechanically into another use. (There's also a lot of traffic as Akbar attempts to flee his problems in his top-down convertible, only to be surrounded by hundreds of happy "extras.") Simin's inability to bear a child drives her to desperate ends, including witchcraft (a new twist on the alcoholic Hollywood wife), and finally taking into the home a deaf-mute Gypsy who will bear her husband's child, then disappear. Or not. Makhmalbaf almost imperceptibly draws us from comedy into caring for this strange triangle who become a kind of family.