He comes on as a religious fanatic, but what we learn about him illuminates, ever so affectingly, the fundamental separation in today's Iran between the secular bourgeois class and the religiousworkingclass.
So when Nader hires Razieh, a deeply religious, workingclass woman to care for his father who has advanced Alzheimer's, it sets in motion a rather unexpected whodunit of sorts.
It united wealthy northern industrial and financial interests with southern rural racists with religious fundamentalists with workingclass whites in trade unions across the country.