Dir: Jafar Panahi. Iran. 2003. 96mins.

The triumphant march of Iranian cinema continues apace. After Samira Makhmalbaf's At Five In The Afternoon won the jury prize in the main competition at Cannes comes Crimson Gold, Jafar Panahi's fourth feature, which picked up the Un Certain Regard jury prize. Set in present-day Tehran, the film deals with a busy, secular city which first seems a thousand miles from the repressive theocracy of Panahi's last outing, the Golden Lion winner The Circle. And the memorable central character, an obese and taciturn pizza delivery boy, initially appears like a Farsi version of one of Ken Loach's doomed chancers. But with a script by Abbas Kiarostami, the eminence grise of Iranian cinema, Crimson Gold is more allusive, more digressive and less didactic than Loach, and draws strength and originality from its refusal to preach. An appetising prospect for international arthouse distributors, it should at least equal the respectable limited-release results of Panahi's previous films.

It is no spoiler to reveal the end of the film, as it comes at the beginning: during a bungled robbery in a jewellery store, an outsize gunman first kills the owner and then turns his gun on himself. The rest of the film is a prologue to this dramatic mise-en-scene, illuminating the logic behind the robber's gesture. Hussein, the fat man in question, delivers pizzas for a risible wage. But at least he has a job; and for his best friend Ali, he is a perfect match for his sister. The three visit an uptown jewellery store in search of wedding baubles; but one look is enough to convince the owner that they are low-budget time-wasters, and he tells them to try the gold bazaar at the cheap end of town.

Humiliation, then is one of the driving forces behind Hussein's self-destructive final flip; another is the parade of easy money he sees all around him when delivering pizzas to the smart neighbourhoods of Teheran. But this summary makes the plot-springs sound more mechanical than they really are.

Two things raise Crimson Gold above the level of simple moral parable: one is the lead role of Hussein, a taciturn loner who reacts to almost everything he sees with slow-witted, stolid disgust, which is fleshed out magnificently by first-time actor Hussein Emadeddin; the other are the digressive, absurdist pizza-delivery episodes that pepper the plot.

Most memorable is a scene in which Hussein is caught up in an army stake-out of an illegal party at an uptown address. This surreal, waiting game (the guests are arrested once they leave), which ends with a mock-Biblical feeding of the 5,000 as Hussein distributes pizza to the hungry soldiers, is the closest Panahi comes to an explicit political statement. A finely-scripted episode, full of suppressed hilarity, it shows how repression is often the work of ordinary people applying abstract rules in a bored, bureaucratic way.

Hossein Djafarian, who shot Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees, abandons the lingering takes of that film for a more grainy, colourful look that brings out the glaring chaos of the modern city. And Peyman Yazdanian's soundtrack provides a nicely deadpan commentary, with its laid-back, breathy sax evolutions.

Prod co: Jafar Panahi Productions
Int'l sales: Celluloid Dreams
Prod: Panahi
Scr: Abbas Kiarostami
Cinematography: Hossein Djafarian
Prod des: Iraj Raminfar
Ed: Panahi
Music: Peyman Yazdanian
Main cast: Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Shahram Vaziri, Ehsan Amani, Pourang Nakhayi, Kaveh Najmabadi, Saber Safael