The Peddler is comprised of three existential journeys set in the confusion and poverty of the immediate post-revolutionary period. It shows Makhmalbaf's ability to skate a fine line between sly humor and grim tragedy, neorealism and hyperrealism. In "The Happy Child," loosely based on a story by Moravia, a destitute couple leave their slum dwelling to find a home for their newborn girl lest she suffer the fate of their other, deformed children. But they are loathe to abandon the child to the crusty indifference of the city. "The Birth of an Old Woman" starts out as a wildly sardonic chamber piece for two characters-an Iranian Norman Bates and his catatonic mother-but develops brilliantly into an allegory on mob mentality and psychosis in a pressure-cooker society. Another kind of mob looms in "The Peddler," in which a hapless fence is threatened by hoodlum entrepreneurs. He imagines scenarios of violent death taken straight from western-style gangster films, but life proves different, darker even, than the mind's screen.