Directed by Jafar Panahi
Written by Abbas Kiarostami
Starring Aida Mohammadkhami, Mohsen Kalifi, Fereshteh Sadr Ofrani, Anna Borkowska
Iran, 1995
Panahi has made three films and I’ve seen two of them. His 1995 debut, The White Balloon, quietly sucked me in when, at first, I was resisting what I perceived to be its revolting cuteness. It bears a strong resemblance to Where Is the Friend’s Home?, a film in which a young boy sets out to do the responsible thing and return a misplaced notebook to its owner, his friend, who will be expelled from school if he doesn’t have it. The boy goes through a bunch of towns and winding roads that appear over and over again and is disrupted by various selfish characters. He ends up doing the homework for the boy himself, and I ended up wondering, “Why in the hell didn’t he do that in the first place and save him, and us, all the trouble?” Panahi’s film is much more skillful and taut than Kiarostami’s, or maybe it’s just less esoteric. It follows the journey of Razieh (Aida Mohammadkhami), a very young girl who asks her mother to give her money for a chubby, colorful pet fish. The mother relents and the girl must get from her home to the shop safely. The moment the mother warns, “Don’t lose the money!”, I groaned because I knew she would. (As naturalistic as the Iranian films seem to be, they still have their predictable tricks and devices.)
Razieh makes her way through the city, which is on the verge of celebrating New Year’s Day. It turns out it’s not so easy for a girl to get through her own hometown nowadays, and she learns a lot by just going out on her own; she witnesses the world of men (the goons are playing with snakes and practically steal the poor girl’s money), and she’s ignored by a few busy adults. The movie isn’t exclusively Iranian; it could be set anywhere with some costume and location changes, and it could be set in many third-world Asian countries without any. It’s one of those universally themed pictures. But I didn’t find it repellent at all. You’d think Panahi was trying to win you over with Razieh’s pout (director Majid Majidi is sometimes accused of this kind of crowd-pleasing) but his vision is eventually revealed as something a tad darker. Her whining is contrasted with the pleasant understanding of Fereshteh Sadr Ofrani, who plays the mother. Her wincing and crying is annoying. Her demands for the fish and her desires are narrowly focused.
Feigning real time with a light-hearted ease, Panahi explores the selfishness of childhood and the concept of growing-up. The depictions of inattentive adults are right on-target and we are always aware that the girl is being condescended to and that, because of her smallness, she has little power in the hectic world of the city, and that her only weapon against this lack of attention is her sour adorability and grating sulkiness. The most poignant character in the whole film is a boy who helps Razieh and her brother retrieve their five hundred tomans from a drain; he seems to think he’s made two new friends but is ultimately forgotten by those he aided. It is he who possesses the film’s title object, which helps them get the banknote out, and for his kind deed he is repaid with the cold shoulder and is left as a solitary figure on a day of national merriment. (Kids are so cruel!) The White Balloon is striking because it never broods or glowers like its child protagonist but sustains a measured, affecting amount of neorealistic dread. It is faithful to the template common in four of the five Iranian films I’ve seen so, story-wise, it’s not particularly inventive. Panahi manipulates realism, making it conducive to his themes. The simplicity and ordinariness of Abbas Kiarostami’s screenplay gives the illusion of realism and hides Panahi’s refreshing precision.
The one exception to the Iranian neorealist rule in my group of five is Panahi’s The Circle. It’s like Ingmar Bergman’s Brink of Life, with three female performances feeding off each other, and its way of tying its ensemble of characters, performances, and issues up has that same obvious feeling of being pre-planned. But it’s also a much less saccharine and vastly better film. The Circle is also a women’s-issues movie, like the Bergman film, and because it explores the mistreatment of women in Iran, it was banned there. (This is one of the main things that will help the film sell, and the marketers know it; similar to the advertisements for China’s controversial Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, the poster states in bold lettering “BANNED IN IRAN.”) The film begins with a number of ear-splitting screams heard over the titles, which immediately makes it a different creature than Panahi’s first. “It’s a girl,” a nurse announces. The grandmother of the newborn baby laments, “But the ultrasound said it was a boy!” The child is unwanted, and now the family the mother married into has reason to divorce her. Later in the film, we witness a pregnant woman’s pleas for an abortion and another dissatisfied mom abandoning her girl in hopes she will have a better life with another family. The Circle seamlessly connects these related stories, and others, like baton passing; the opening segment in the hospital disappears into the bulk of the plot involving three women fresh out of prison trying to make their way somewhere.
Arezou (Mayiam Palvin Almani), the feisty one, gives disrespectful male passers-by a piece of her mind, and seems to be very much a tough woman of the new millennium, though her mission is to help the other ladies before herself; Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) keeps on hesitating when boarding a bus that will take her to the dreamland of her childhood, where all her troubles will end; Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani again) is the unmarried one with a burdening pregnancy that will dishonor her (she’s already been pretty much disowned by her family; parental shame and neglect is apparently heavy on Panahi’s mind). I have been concerned about the condition of the female race in foreign countries for quite some time (this is not to say that the topic isn’t still big in the States as well); what most of us in America know about it all is only what we hear in the news and on Oprah and the TV dramas. We hear about skin burned by battery acid, and that a woman has no choice but to accept the proposal of a rich man lest she should starve to death. It’s all sensationalist information and what’s so surprising about Panahi’s film is that, even though its advertising suggests something wild and dramatic and thrillingly tragic, it never indulges our silent desires to hear about all the gruesome details. In fact, I don’t recall any one scene in The Circle in which a woman is ferociously beaten up by a villainous male figure; that doesn’t mean those things don’t happen in Iran. There are a number of hints, like the bruise on Nargess Mamizadeh’s eye, but we aren’t let in on the violence and action. Panahi’s illusions of naturalism and documentary style brilliantly disguise his picking-and-choosing of horrors. Instead of aggressively going for the jugular, he informs us that these people are denied the basic rights others enjoy. A woman can’t purchase a bus ticket without an ID or escort; a woman can’t get an abortion without consent from a man; a woman has to deal with polygamy; a woman can’t walk through the streets without being heavily clothed and covered by chadors; the woman is at fault if she prostitutes herself and is picked up. This is not Sally Field in Not Without My Daughter; when Arezou talks back to a man on the street, she’s not assaulted or injured. There aren’t any demonic characters here, and this is not a character study. Of course, the demon is the mentality that allows people to use the Koran to justify the oppression of women, but the movie never really investigates that side of it.
Fereshteh Sadr Orfani has only appeared in two movies but she looks like a pro, like a legend of international cinema. Her nice mommy in The White Balloon was the flipside to Iran Outari’s loud, uncomprehending one in Where Is the Friend’s Home? When she ran out of the house she’d just been banished from, and I recognized her from The White Balloon, I felt a strange relief, maybe because it brought a familiarity to the film, but also because she’s got a decency and intensity that I enjoyed in that film (she also serves as assistant director on this one). In this movie she gets, arguably, the most showy and melodramatic of the principal roles, and she goes the furthest of all the actresses in helping us to understand her character’s plight. I don’t think I can fully appreciate any of these superb performances because I don’t know Farsi; the subtitles kill the suspense of a delivery of a line, and we can never really gauge the emotions when observations of the dialogue are mainly limited to reading the subtitles, which is one of my habits. (Towards the end of the film, a man begins to sing a song and we aren’t even given the benefit of learning what he’s singing about.) Orfani comes through though, and so does the final actress to be introduced in the film. Mojgan Faramarzi plays a prostitute who’s just been arrested, and she’s plump and rebellious when she calls a guy “honey” as if it were an insult. She’s blank-faced; we assume that she’s been to jail before as she sits knowingly in the paddy wagon. The women are all lumped into one group in this movie, but they’re ultimately left to fend for themselves. They are outcasts of outcasts in their own country.
Panahi shows intelligence and sophistication, if not the dodgy “poetic” sense of Kiarostami. Neither The White Balloon nor The Circle has the same elusive, spacious ideas and emotions that The Wind Will Carry Us has, but they have a directness that I like. Panahi’s techniques are usually obvious but they work; his motifs in the latter film – the circles and semicircles Bahram Badakshani makes with his camera, and the circular architecture of the buildings pictured – aren’t as inane as they sound on paper and add a richness to the work. There’s no end to his story, just like the Middle East issues seem hopeless because sexism and Islam are not likely to die any time soon. The camera pans around to discover most of the women we’ve met during the course of The Circle in the same cell, and a square window identical to the one in the hospital. Both settings are like cages for the female race in Iran.
Panahi doesn’t take us deeper into the psyches of these women, which is a bit of a shame, and he flat-out refuses to tug our heartstrings or turn the film into a heroic triumph or blatant victim story with the kind of feelings out of Homeward Bound and All Dogs Go to Heaven, which used to get me so sick with grief from the machined all-alone-in-the-world pity-mongering. But the feelings in this film range from anxiety to uncertainty to sadness to guilt to apathy; the director just doesn’t seem to be interested in the source of the problem, which makes the film less of a political and educational statement, and more real and raw. He captures the city well, wandering from place to place as these characters desperately try to find a way out of their situations, and he finds the perfect timbre for his material; the resonance of his films, despite the frequent obviousness of the metaphors and structures, and because of the lean, gratifying lucidity and the clever and deliberate “resolutions” that create an impact with their design and ambiguities, is extraordinary and unexpected. He’s quickly becoming, I think, one of our great filmmakers.
By Andrew Chan [AUGUST 13, 2001]