Sigh, the English-language synopsis of this film ("Several people try to take advantage of a little girl’s innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her") feels not only factually inaccurate, but completely misses the point of the film's patience and morality.
Love the bit where the goldfish turns out to be smaller than expected and needs to be told to look at it from the side... and that she doesn't seem to care and grins.
To say that Panahi has served up the universe in a teacup makes the film sound overblown and pretentious, and it’s anything but. Yet it certainly is a universe — a densely realized space-time continuum suggesting both a picaresque novel and a piece of music — that taught me a lot more about the flow of time in everyday life than anything I’ve seen lately from Hollywood.[…]
One technique developed by Kiarostami that Panahi adopts is keeping the overall story a secret from the actors — especially the child actors — to ensure the spontaneity of their performances.
[…]
My quarrel with [most] analysis — which goes on to criticize The White Balloon for not even attempting to challenge, even cautiously, “the ubiquitous imagery of chador-clad women, fulfilling their traditional roles” — is that it places an outsize requirement on filmmakers like Panahi that most Western critics would never dream of placing on Western filmmakers. Though I share Louvish’s indignation about the enslavement of Iranian women, obliging every Iranian filmmaker to address this subject implies another (albeit less direct) form of enslavement — and one that costs the Western critic nothing.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)
Synopsis: Several people try to take advantage of a little girl's innocence to hustle money her mom gave to her to buy a goldfish with.