The Fifth Reaction, directed by Tahmineh Milani, is a continuation of her previous The Hidden Half (2001). The film begins with a Joy Luck Club (1993) motif. Five well-educated women, former classmates at school, are lunching at a fine restaurant, sharing the joyful and unlucky experiences of their lives; the former involve work, the latter refer to men. As the film proceeds, two women face problems. The first problem emerges during lunch. The husband of one woman, who enters the restaurant with his twenty-year-old secretary, soon realizes that his wife is present. He goes over to her table and launches a vitriolic tirade about the impropriety of women dining out when they should be at home, attending to domestic responsibilities. The husband orders his wife to go home, but she objects. The husband’s voice is so loud that the restaurant manager comes over to ask him to pipe down, but soon he must use force to restrain the overexcited husband. The wife then resolves to teach him a lesson, Lysistrata style. She goes home, puts some of her things in a bag, and lives elsewhere until her husband comes to his senses and apologizes. Her strategy works, and in two weeks she is back home and the owner of a new automobile. The second problem occupies most of the rest of the film. Fereshteh (played by Niki Karimi), an underpaid schoolteacher, has recently become a widow, leaving fatherless her two sons, aged seven and nine. After lunch, she returns to the home of her father-in-law, Haj Safdar (played by Jamshid Hashempour), whom she believes to be fair and just, but he instead invokes an ancient custody tradition, contrary to current Iranian law, that predates the existence of working women. He orders her to move back to her father’s home, leaving the children behind with him while giving Fereshteh visitation rights. As a widow, she no longer has any legal ties with the father-in-law, so he is asserting the right to determine who will live in his house, believing that the two children will be better off living with someone rich, though he has no wife to serve as mother for the boys. Fereshteh, however, pleads that the boys need a mother regardless of her income level. Haj Safdar then offers a compromise: She can stay in the house with the two sons “on one condition,” namely, that she will marry his remaining son, Majid. Fereshteh refuses to do so, moves out, and she sees the boys as often as she can. One day, she learns that the boys will be vacationing at some distance from Tehran, and she fears that the boys may soon be sent to live with their aunt in Singapore, permanently out of her reach. Accordingly, she consults with her four lunchmates, who come up with a solution: She is to fly to Dubai and get a job with the aid of a friend of one of the five women. However, Haj Safdar suspects that she is about to escape, so he tails her as she goes to the airport in her friend’s car. To avoid a confrontation at the airport, Fereshteh then decides that she must evade him by leaving the country instead by boat. Fereshteh heads for the Persian Gulf, living in houses of friends along the way, but Haj Safdar remains in hot pursuit. When he finally catches up with her at a port city, he has her thrown in jail. Fereshteh’s female friend at the port lectures Haj Safdar on the need of children for their mother, and Haj Safdar appears contrite. He goes into the jail cell and offers to drop the charges “on one condition.” The movie then ends without telling filmviewers about that condition. The Fifth Reaction identifies a host of customs and government regulations that favor men over women in Iran, all to the detriment of the best interests of children as well as women, and thus is a plea for gender equality. However, some Iranians may find the film amusing because the men portrayed are too extreme to be credible characters. MH