The great Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf suggested the idea for Babak Payami's pleasing low-key comedy Secret Ballot, which mirrors the opening of Makhmalbaf's recent Kandahar with the same absurd yet strangely lyrical shot of unusual cargo drifting down from the sky. Only in this case, the cargo isn't wooden legs for amputees, but a ballot box dropped at sunrise on a remote island, the perfect comic metaphor for the uncertain voting process in a fledging democracy. The film never quite reclaims that level of visual eloquence—neither does Kandahar, for that matter—but Payami stretches the tired conventions of a mismatched road movie into a quietly progressive look at women's rights and the mixed values of representative government. Breaking from his regular duty of patrolling the coastline for smugglers, soldier Cyrus Abidi gets reassigned to accompany a polling agent on Election Day and collect votes from the disparate villages around the island. To his surprise and disapproval, a motorboat swings by the beach and drops off Nassim Abdi, an energetic and fiercely idealistic woman who's determined to bring out as many voters as possible by the 5 p.m. deadline. Though the soldier bristles at his charge and openly questions the usefulness of their mission, he chauffeurs Abdi through the desert roads, where they face a few apathetic and uninformed voters, a language barrier (some speak Arabic, but not Farsi), and more irregularities than the state of Florida. The uneasy chemistry between the two brings some comic potency to their early scenes together: When they spot a man sprinting across a field, the agent wants to collect his vote while the soldier draws his weapon, thinking he's caught another smuggler. But as these episodes accumulate, Payami doesn't give them an overall shape, much less a dramatic arc, so the film seems steadily more repetitive and undercooked, nearly to the point where full reels could be swapped without anyone noticing the difference. Still, even when the story falls slack, Payami still manages to view some important social and political issues from a multitude of angles. He clearly sympathizes with the agent's point of view, but by setting the film on a remote island instead of the mainland, he poses a stiff challenge to her democratic ideals. How much value does democracy have in a place that's governed by its own set of laws and traditions? What real difference will any of the candidates make in their lives? These are heavy questions for a comedy, which probably accounts for why Secret Ballot isn't very funny. But Payami's gentle curiosity addresses them with a lightness of touch that never seems inconsequential.