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Terrestrial Verses shows what everyday life in an authoritarian regime is like through a series of conversations. Although the circumstances of the conversations vary, they're always between a less-powerful person (facing the camera) and a more-powerful person (a voice off). Each situation is infuriating in its own way, but Ali Asgari and Alireza Khatami mine a vein of absurd humor throughout the film, so that, by the end, we have laughed so hard at these authoritarian fools that they have lost their power. In life outside the film the fools only seem to grow more powerful and more numerous. The film is set in Iran, but its message is both universal and timely. It feels like many more people are very soon going to need Asgari's and Khataim's gift for seeing the absurd and their characters' cleverness in finding a way.

You'd think that a film set in the mid-1960s about sons and fathers at loggerheads would be about rebellious youngsters in their 20s rejecting the staid values of their uptight elders, but that's not what we have here. Instead, the son is one of the uptight elders (he is a 40-year-old former Marine) and the father is an 80-year-old formerly important man. The two are at turning-points in their lives and at loggerheads because the son realizes that he'll never be--doesn't want to be--the man his father wants him to be. We also see how the father's personality was shaped by the hardship and resentment caused by his own absent, drunken father.

Both of the leads, Melvyn Douglas as the imperious but fading old man and Gene Hackman as his son the writer, are excellent. Their contrasting acting styles mirror their generational differences. The roles of the mother and sister are largely written in terms of the father-son dynamic, but Dorothy Stickney (mother) and Estelle Parsons (daughter) both add depth to their characters.

The production looks cheap and one misjudged song really does almost ruin the sequence it's presumably meant to highlight, but at least it looks like a film rather than a stage play. The question of how to care for aging relatives is universal, and the two documentary forays into institutions for the care of the aged are especially chilling.

Strong acting and interesting themes show us more the discontents than the charms of the bourgeoisie.

A daughter, about to enter college, goes on a three-day hike in the woods with her father and her father's longtime friend. It sounds like a classic coming-of-age plot: older men share their wisdom, teaching woman on the cusp of adulthood valuable life lessons. Except, as it turns out here, it's the daughter who does the wisdom-sharing, though whether either the father or his friend actually listens is another question-perhaps one answered by the final shot.

Lily Collias, who plays the daughter, has a face always in motion and seeming to reflect even the most fleeting emotions. Each of the unhappy men is unhappy in his own way, and if there are any lessons to be learned from them, it's don't pay attention to anything I say and don't do anything I'd do.

The music is very well done and the photography of Upstate New York lush.