This fascinating and disturbing film is comprised of three stylistically different short episodes set among the poor urban dwellers of contemporary Tehran. The first, based on a Moravia story, is about a kindly but naive couple who travel to the city to find someone to adopt their newborn daughter; their encounters there make them even more loath to abandon her. The second concerns a mentally unstable man who lives with his invalid mother in a ramshackle apartment. An astonishing mix of absurdist comedy and the supernatural, it also depicts the too-real threat of predatory neighbors. The final section draws on the conventions of the American gangster film to show the last hours of a peddler suspected of betraying his friends, as told from the point of view of the doomed man's overactive imagination. Shockingly forthright in its view of the social and economic problems of the post-Shah era, The Peddler amply demonstrates the world-class talents of its young writer/director, a self-taught filmmaker who was imprisoned as a member of a militant political group acting against the Shah's regime. (AS)