FROM IRAN, PORTRAIT OF AN ANGRY SOUL.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

JAFAR PANAHI reinforces his position as Iran's boldest director with ``Crimson Gold.''

Though not as hard-hittingly polemical as his previous bashing of institutionalized sexism, ``The Circle,'' it's easy to see how this subtler, marginally more violent effort upset the Islamic state's censors even more.

``Crimson'' proposes, with the authority that only a story inspired by real events can, that contemporary Tehran is a city deeply divided along economic lines, with utterly different rules as well as lifestyles for the well-to-do and for everyone else. Even more upsetting, it sympathetically shows how those from the lower classes might level the playing field (or exact their revenge, which may be no different) through both legal and criminal means. That would bug censors anywhere, theocracy or not.

Working from a script by the more decorous Abbas Kiarostami (``Taste of Cherry,'' ``Ten''), ``Crimson'' opens with a brilliantly unsettling, one-shot take of a jewelry store robbery - a sequence which, like many to follow, utilizes off-screen space and sound as effectively as what Panahi chooses to show us. The rest of the film is a flashback to what led up to this brutal encounter.

Hussein is a pizza delivery man, played by a real-life pizza delivery man (and paranoid schizophrenic to boot) named Hussein Emadeddin. Bloated, shambling, his pockmarked face frozen into an inexpressive mask that somehow communicates a constant inner throb of pain, Hussein runs into absurdity and frustration practically every time he pulls his scooter up to a comfortable customer's building.

There are elevators that don't work and old war buddies who don't recognize their former brother-in-arms (Hussein mumbles something about disfiguring cortizone treatments). The military police prevent him from making a delivery while they lie in wait to bust partygoers as they trickle out of a neighboring apartment. Invited into a sumptuous penthouse by a neurotic bachelor whose girlfriend just walked out, Hussein drunkenly discovers just how much his miserable existence can lack, even as his voluble host makes it evident that he isn't any happier.

Back at the pizza parlor, Hussein's chatty co-workers (one of whom's sister the big galoot is indifferently engaged to) are as obsessed with sex as the Americanized penthouse playboy. Hussein responds to all of this with an intensity many notches below slow burn, yet we do feel something building behind his impassive facade.

The movie is being sold as a statement against injustice, prejudice and hypocrisy, but its real point is something more evasive and peculiar. Hussein is both a product of his environment and an anomaly in it. ``Crimson Gold'' is as much a warning about the dangers of self-containment as it is an expose of a dysfunctional society.

Which is another prime reason why the movie has never been shown in Iran - and why, with all its complicated and sometimes elliptical honesty, we're lucky to have it here.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CRIMSON GOLD - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: violence, language)

Starring: Hussein Emadeddin, Kamyar Sheissi, Azita Rayeji, Pourang Nakhayi, Shahram Vaziri.

Director: Jafar Panahi.

Running time: 1 hr. 37 min.

Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; One Colorado, Pasadena; Music Hall, Beverly Hills; University Town Center 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: A pizza delivery man slowly, quietly goes homicidally nuts in this devastating look at economic inequality in Iran.