The days of ‘opera in English’ as a cause, at times almost a crusade, have long passed. Surtitles have confined it to history, and its use by English National Opera at the Coliseum in their new Cosi fan tutte — even in Martin Fitzpatrick’s literate and witty translation — is the only blemish in a performance of complete enchantment.

The production is the work of the Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami — I blush to say I haven’t seen his A Taste of Cherry (a Cannes Palme d’Or winner), but on this evidence I can’t wait to see that and any other of his works which comes along. In this, his first opera production, it seems to me that he explores the psychology of four confused young people with an extraordinary depth, sympathy and understanding; even Alfonso, who gives them the lessons in this “school of love” — the work’s subtitle — is presented not as the usual cynical schemer (or raddled old roué), but as an 18th-century philosophe who frees them from the catastrophic mésalliances with which the opera starts. (He was sung here, with understated elegance, by Steven Page.) Not that, at the end, the couples necessarily return to their new partners — they are simply free to choose, but now with new understanding. True, this tweaks Mozart’s librettist da Ponte a little, but Kiarostami justifies this ending by his masterly handling of the wooing of Fiordiligi and Dorabella by the ‘Albanians’. Here, instead of the usual inept ‘Turkish’ get-up , the men are disguised as Iranian courtiers, their ravishing costumes apparently straight out of the classical Persian department of the V & A; liberated by their disguise, their every gesture is charming and refined. So is their singing — I particularly like Liam Bonner’s elegant rendering of Guglielmo’s Tutti accusan le donne, and as Ferrando Thomas Glenn sang a reflective, gentle Un aura amorosa.

Fiona Murphy (Dorabella) suggested from the start the suggestible girl who will not put up too much resistance, but the evening belonged (as it should) to the elder sister Fiordiligi. Susan Gritton brilliantly hinted at the slight edge of parody in the pure opera seria aria Come scogoio, but at the end, as she yielded with helpless sincerity to Ferrando, she revealed their final duet (that oboe!) as a masterpiece of 18th-century erotic art.

Kiarostami and his designer Malika Chauveau produced the most beautiful sets I have seen for a long time — the ‘backcloth’ behind the sisters’ house showed the sea, through filmed back-projection, in constant motion, while the foreground is bathed in warm, autumnal light. Will such heavenly days return again? No — Cosi was written in the very year of the French Revolution.

Cosi fan tutte continues until July 5. For tickets call 0871 911 0200 (www.eno.org).