The Suitors begins as a dark comedy about cultural displacement and its absurd, sometimes lunatic twists among a community of Iranians in Manhattan; gradually, it becomes a film about a woman's very different experience of that absurdity. Mariyam, a beautiful young bride-by-arrangement, arrives in New York, only to have her husband die in a bizarre case of mistaken identity involving a sheep, a bathtub facing Mecca, and a trigger-happy SWAT-team. The new, now wealthy widow becomes the quarry of her husband's friends, who begin to court her, but Mariyam has other plans: ducking into an alley to remove her veil, she soon is reading Vanity Fair and listening to rap music. Much of the film's offbeat charm and unpredictability comes from the fact that Mariyam has no idea what she wants; she only knows what she does not want, and being kidnaped to the New Jersey home of one of her suitors is definitely in the latter category. Her escape from the fate of 40 Square Metres' wife-prisoner is "part Alfred Hitchcock, part Lucille Ball" (N.Y. Times).