"3 Faces" - Jafar Panahi (2018)

Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi is famous not only for his outstanding films but also for his heroic struggles to freely express himself in the face of an oppressive dictatorship.  After the Iranian government violently suppressed the Green Movement’s peaceful protests of the controversial 2009 Presidential elections, Panahi (along with other associates, including Mohammad Rasoulof) was arrested for trying to make a documentary film concerning those events.  In 2010 he was convicted of essentially treasonous behaviour and sentenced to six years in prison and also given a 20-year ban on engaging in any filmmaking activities and on leaving the country.  Nevertheless and despite the severity of this sentence, Panahi has somehow managed to continue making films, albeit under extremely constrained conditions.  His recent films This is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2014), and Taxi Tehran (2015) were basically all shot within single living enclosures (in Taxi Tehran’s case, inside a single taxicab).  All three of these films were interesting not only for their subject matter but also as experiments in novel cinematic expression.

Now Panahi has come out with a fourth film since his 2010 arrest, 3 Faces (Se Rokh, 2018).  This features a wider degree of spatial latitude, presumably because Panahi’s six-year prison sentence, which was apparently served as a house interest, had now come to an end.  Thus the restrictions on Panahi’s movements had now apparently been relaxed somewhat, and he could now move around a little.  So 3 Faces concerns a road trip that Panahi and a friend take up into the northwestern Iranian province of Azerbaijan (which is where Panahi grew up).  The film was presented at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where its script written by Panahi and Nader Saeivar was given the award for Best Screenplay [1]. 

Many Iranian films, particularly those of Panahi as well as those of his senior colleague Abbas Kiastomi under whom he once served, have a semi-documentary feel to them, which some critics have likened to neorealism.  And 3 Faces is no exception on this score.  But Panahi tends to go further in this respect and intentionally blurs the boundary between narrative fiction and documented reality, with most of the characters, including Panahi, playing themselves in the story that is told.  So the viewer is sometimes left wondering if he or she is watching a documentary about Panahi or a fictional story about Panahi – or even a documentary about Panahi making a film about Panahi.

The story of 3 Faces begins in highly dramatic fashion with Panahi hurriedly driving his well-known actress friend Behnaz Jafari (played by herself) up into Azerbaijan, a northwest Iranian province where the natives speak the Turkic Azeri language.  The two travellers are responding to a self-made video that Panahi had received from a young woman, Marziyeh Rezaei (playing herself), that was intended for Ms. Jafari and which expressed her intention to commit suicide.  In fact the selfie video, which was shot in a single take, appears to show the girl actually committing suicide by hanging herself from mountainside tree branch. 

Ms. Jafari is beside herself with concern and is desperately hoping that the video she has seen was artificially staged by the clearly distraught girl in order to arouse her concern.  What has driven Marziyeh to such desperation is that her passionate dreams of self-fulfilment are being thwarted by her conservative family.  She fervently wants to become an actress, and she has been accepted to study in a prestigious drama school.  But her family thinks that the idea of becoming an “entertainer” is shameful and has insisted that Marziyeh accept an arranged marriage and resign herself to being an ordinary village housewife.  Marziyeh believes that if Ms. Jafari, who is a well-known TV and film actress and therefore a celebrity, could intercede on her behalf, then she might be able to persuade her family that acting can be a respectable profession for a woman.  But as Marziyeh explains in her video, her repeated failures to get Behnaz to respond to her phone calls has driven the young girl to a suicidal state.

So the stage is set for melodrama.  But when Panahi and Jafari reach Marziyeh’s home town of Mianeh (which is also Panahi’s home town), things slow down, and the film takes on a more leisurely tone as it explore the film’s larger themes [2].  As the two visitors look around for Marziyeh, they have a number of encounters with the provincial locals, which give Panahi an opportunity to take a satirical look at  some aspects of traditional Iranian ways of thinking on the local level.  It turns out that Jafari’s suspicions were correct: Marziyeh’s suicide was staged.  But the issues that led Marziyeh to desperation are still there. Marziyeh has fled her family’s home and is still missing. 

As the characters Panahi and Jafari explore the area looking for Marziyeh, Panahi, the filmmaker, explores some other issues in his usual oblique (by necessity) manner:

• Truth 
  The question of how the people know what is true is always an issue in Iran, and this film alludes to that in several places.  One instance, of course. is the truth of Marziyeh’s suicide, which turns out to be false.  But the issue of truth is generalized when Jafari, questioning the veracity of Marziyeh’s selfie video, wonders aloud whether she is actually an uninformed participant in a fiction film that is being made by Panahi about suicide.  The viewer will naturally reflect on the meta-level ramifications of Jafari’s speculation.    
  
  But in any society, the approach to a true understanding of things will be severely hindered if one-half of the population, i.e. the women, are restricted from expressing themselves.
   
  
• Masculinity and Femininity 
  There are several encounters with the villagers that display some common attitudes of these people towards gender.  On one occasion they were stopped on a narrow mountain road by an injured bull that blocked the way.  The farmer who owned the bull sang the praises of his bull’s virility because of its capability of impregnating ten cows in one night. For him such a display of virility was a matter of high honour.  They have another encounter with a local who holds his son’s circumcision-removed and preserved foreskin to have near sacred importance.  This man also dreams of his son emulating in real-life the film roles of old masculine film idol Behrouz Vossoughi.  Vossoughi was famous for his roles in stories of revenge and hatred (e.g. Qeysar (1969) and Tangsir (1974)) [4].  What he wants is for his son to be a “real man” and carry out vengeful attacks of retribution the way Vossoughi did in his movies.  As for women, their proper role is to serve in the home as housewives – as violently expressed by Marziyeh’s brother.

Panahi and Jafari eventually do find out that Marziyeh is hiding out in the relatively remote home of an old woman named Shahrzad, who was an active actress, dancer, and poet before the 1979 Iranian revolution but who dropped out of sight after the revolution and is now a neglected and poverty-stricken recluse.
 
Although Shahrzad’s face is never seen in this film, she is an important figure thematically, and she is one of the “3 Faces” (along with Marziyeh and Behnaz Jafari) referred to in the film’s title.  Her character in this film is, like all the characters in this story, undoubtedly a reference to another real person – in this case, Kobra Amin Sa’idi.  She was an important poet, dancer, and actress in the 1960s and 70s who performed under the stage name “Shahrzad” – for example in Qeysar (1969) and Dash Akol (1971).  But the new and oppressive revolutionary culture had no place for her womanly artistry [3].  A documentary account of her life, then and now, has been presented in the film Shahrzaad's Tale (2015).

Eventually Marziyeh and Behnaz do hook up with each other, but the film’s ultimate resolution at the end is not entirely clear.  The options available to Marziyeh are uncertain, at best.

Panahi tells this tale in a leisurely fashion, with many reaction shots, some of them in the form of long takes to convey the mood of the of the onscreen observer/listener (Jafari or Panahi).  Note in this connection that Panahi’s three preceding films, shot as they were under severe restrictions due to his sentencing, all had an unavoidable feeling of confinement to  them.  Here in 3 Faces, though, with Panahi now afforded greater leeway to move around, one might expect the claustrophobic aura to be significantly lessened.  Nevertheless, even though 3 Faces does have many exterior shots, including many shots of the road as seen from looking outside of Panahi’s vehicle, there is still an overall visual feeling of confinement to the film.  So we are given the sense that our pursuers of truth in this story are considerably restricted with respect to the reality they can observe.

If we reflect on the “3 Faces” presented in this film, we can see that Panahi has given us three different era-dependent perspectives on womanhood in Iran:

• Shahrzad (the past)
  She represents the pre-revolutionary period of Iran in the 1960s and 70s when women were starting to be given more equitable treatment and opportunities in society.  Shahrzad, herself, was an expressive embodiment of this opening-up.  The fact that her face is totally effaced from the current society is a grim comment on what has been lost since that era.
   
• Behnaz Jafari (the present) 
  She represents the more restricted present era, in which a few women can achieve prominence if they manage to appear frequently in the media and toe the line.
   
• Marziyeh (the future) 
  Although Marziyeh is educated,  creative (witness her selfie suicide video), and courageous, her opportunities remain restricted by strong prejudices still rooted in traditional Iranian society.  She represents the uncertain future. 

We can only hope that expressive voices like Panahi’s can help generate a future that will afford the Marziyehs of this world the opportunities they seek.  Then a film like this can have a happy ending.
★★★
                                                 
Notes:

1. Jessica Kiang, “Film Review: ‘3 Faces’”, Variety, (1 July 2018).   
2. Geoff Andrew, “Cannes first look: Three Faces’s road trip finds Jafar Panahi on familiar ground”, Sight & Sound, (15 May 2018).   
3. “Poetry, or the Power of Existence: Shahin Parhami’s ‘Shahrzaad’s Tale’“, Ajam Media Collective, (2 August 2017).   
4. But Behrouz Vossoughi played a somewhat more reflective and tragic figure in Dash Akol (1971).

"Taxi" - Jafar Panahi (2015)

Famed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s difficult circumstances are mostly well known.  Following the notorious Iranian 2009 Presidential elections, when the government violently suppressed the progressive Green Movement’s protests concerning election rigging, Panahi, a Green supporter, was arrested and ultimately sentenced to six-years in prison, banned for 20 years from any filmmaking activities, and barred from leaving the country.  Although the six-year prison sentence is still hanging over his head and Panahi is closely watched by the government authorities, he has somehow managed to clandestinely (and clearly illegally) make and distribute three films in the succeeding years – This is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011), Closed Curtain (Pardé, 2013), and the film under review here: Taxi (Taxi Tehran, 2015).

All three of those films offer film narrative perspectives on personal confinement, but Taxi also sheds light on the larger social world we live in.  In the film, Panahi is a taxi driver on the streets of Tehran and gives rides to an assortment of clients that he picks up.  Everything in the film is seen from the perspective of cameras inside the taxi, both dashboard-mounted cameras and the mobile-phone cameras of some of the people inside. And all the shooting and editing of the film was accomplished in a scant fifteen days [1].  Despite these severe shooting restrictions, the film was smuggled outside of Iran and, remarkably, won the Golden Bear at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival [2].

Note that the shooting of a film entirely inside a taxi had been done before with Abbas Kiastomi’s 10 (Dah, 2002).  But Kiarostami’s film is a staged theatrical production, while Panahi’s Taxi is essentially a documentary film.  Indeed, Taxi has the look and feel of a cinéma vérité documentary, with a seemingly random stream of passengers getting rides in Panahi’s taxi and venting their petty concerns.  But there is more here than at first meets the eye. Iranian cinema has a history of mixing documentary realism with theatrically staged scenes, as can be seen in Kiarostami’s Close-Up (Nema-ye Nazdik, 1990), Panahi’s own The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997), and Madsen’s Sepideh - Reaching for the Stars (2013).  So the wall between objectivity and contrivance is sometimes obscure in this tradition in order to portray some desired intrinsic truth; and so, it seems, this is what happens in Taxi, too [3].  Panahi, as is his custom, avoids diatribes or disquisitions and lets his passengers do all the talking – he, himself, is primarily a listener and says very little.  But these passengers gradually, and in their own words, give us a picture of contemporary Iranian society and to some extent the degree to which the government is suppressing basic freedoms [4,5]. 

In order to fully appreciate Taxi, it helps to have an understanding of Tehran’s taxi culture.  With its huge population and limited public transportation, people in Tehran have for more than forty years relied heavily on hailing a “private taxi” (mashin-e-shakhsi) to get around.  A mashin-e-shakhsi is essentially a private car that is operated by its owner as a taxi cab. For years it has served as an open employment opportunity for men who are willing to put in the gruelling effort to make a go of it.  These cars do not have meters, and gradually over the years, a whole scheme of shared norms has arisen as to what fares to charge customers.  In general the fare prices are relatively inexpensive, and people do not argue much concerning what to pay anyway.  For efficiency and to keep fares low, taxis will often fill up their available seats with other passengers who may be travelling in the same general direction. 

In order to hail a mashin-e-shakhsi, one stands on the curb, and when a car slows down and stops for you, you need to call out your destination.  If the destination is roughly in the direction where the taxi is headed, the driver will likely tell you to get in, even if there are already passengers seated in the cab.  To be a smart taxi hailer, it is best to call out the name of a well-known building or intersection towards which taxis are likely to be headed.  If you have a long or complicated route to take, it may be necessary to take several such taxis, each of which is willing to take you part of the way towards your destination.  All of this may sound like modern ride-sharing schemes, but the Iranian version of it emerged long before the cell-phone-driven systems around today.

Inside these shared taxis, there is an interesting “social space” in which the passengers seem to feel some fleeting moments of confidentiality that are free from the restrictive conditions of the public space [6].  Iranians tend to be surprisingly friendly and open to strangers, anyway, and when they meet momentarily in these taxis, they often express their thoughts openly to each other.  This includes interactions between previously unacquainted men and women, which would be more restricted on the street. So there is almost a special mini-culture of open discussion in these shared taxis, and this is what Panahi has tapped into in this film.

The film opens with no titles or credits; Panahi wanted to protect his collaborators by keeping their names secret. Instead it starts with a shot of more than two minutes with no dialogue and a static frame, looking out the front window of the presumed taxi onto the busy Tehran street.  The first 73 seconds of this shot are static, and then the vehicle begins moving forward through the traffic.  This puts the viewer into a mood of watchful awareness as the taxi cruises along looking for customers.  As the film progresses, Panahi’s taxi has seven “fares” – a person or group of persons that get in the taxi and talk to Panahi.  Most of these fares are linked to particular Iranian social issues that Panahi shows us.  Although these fares sometimes overlap and are not all perfectly sequential, I will discuss them separately.

1.  The Man and the Woman

The first encounter is when the taxi picks up a man and then a woman who are headed in a similar direction.  Inside the cab they begin chatting and soon they are arguing over how thieves should be punished.  The man, who later suggests he is a hired mugger, thinks the regime should hang some criminals in accordance with Sharia law.  This, he says, would scare the population into lawful behavior.  The woman shows more compassion and says the government should address the root causes of extreme poverty that can lead to thievery.

➔ Social issue: the rule of law, wealth inequality.

2.  The DVD Seller

Panahi then picks up a diminutive DVD seller, Omid, who specializes in privately selling contraband videos. His short stature and enterprising attitude remind me of the similar media seller in Mohammad Rasoulof’s Head Wind (Baad-e-Daboor, 2008). Omid in this film sells popular international movies that have been prohibited by the government, and he can even get hold of some pirated movies before they have been released to the public.  As he reminds Panahi, whom he recognizes as a well-known director, they are both in the business of furthering Iranian culture.

➔ Social issue: human rights: freedom of expression

3.  The Accident Couple

Panahi has to stop to take a man who has been seriously injured in a motorcycle accident to the  hospital emergency room.  His wife, who had also been riding with him, accompanies him.  Thinking that he is dying, the injured man wants to have his last will and testament recorded on someone’s cell phone so that he can leave his possessions to his wife.  According to existing law, his brothers would get everything, and his wife would get almost nothing.  Only an explicit will could ensure that his wife would inherit the family possessions.

➔ Social issue: human rights and the rule of law

4.  Women with Goldfish

The next passengers are two middle-aged women with a goldfish bowl containing two goldfish.  They superstitiously believe that their lives depend on their releasing the fish into Ali’s Spring in South Tehran before noon of that day.  These women may have just been examples of the kind of eccentric riders taxi drivers may encounter, but I didn’t see much of a social issue associated with this fare.

5.  Hana

Panahi has to pick up his cheeky 11-year-old niece, Hana, at school and take her home.  Along the way she tells him about her school assignment to make a short movie with her cell phone camera.  Her teacher has ordered that the student films should be “distributable”, i.e. in accordance with the regime’s restrictions on movie making.  According to these rules, the students have been told to

• respect the Islamic headscarf
• allow no contact between men and women
• avoid sordid realism
• avoid violence
• avoid the use of a necktie for good guys
• avoid the use of Iranian names for good guys.  Instead they should use the sacred names of Islamic saints.
• avoid discussion of political and economic issues.

Of course Panahi is familiar with these rules, but he gets Hana to naively talk about them in this film.

➔ Social issue: human rights: freedom of expression

6.  Arash

Panahi meets with his former neighbor, Arash, who wants to share with Panahi some CCTV footage of Arash being mugged and robbed by thugs.  Although Arash wants to share the footage, he doesn’t want to have these particularly thieves (who were masked and hence unidentified) prosecuted.  This was because Arash recognized his assailants and fears that if they were to be prosecuted, they would be executed.

➔ Social issue: the rule of law, wealth inequality.

7.  The Flower Lady
Panahi’s final fare is referred to as the “Flower Lady”, because she is selling roses on the street.  But she is recognisable as an old friend of Panahi’s, the famous human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh.  Sotoudeh, who is shown here to be remarkably cheerful, is on her way to visit Ghoncheh Ghavami, a young woman who has been imprisoned for merely seeking entry to watch a men’s volleyball game.  As Sotoudeh reminds us, this is a situation that Panahi had treated in his earlier film, Offside (2006) [7].

Sotoudeh informs Panahi that Ms. Ghavami had begun a hunger strike after being held in solitary confinement for 100 days.  And as Sotoudeh reminds Panahi (and informs the viewer), they have both, themselves, resorted to hunger strikes to nonviolently protest their cruel treatment while they were unjustly held in prison.  The Center for Human Rights in Iran offers more background on Nasrin Sotoudeh [8]:

Sotoudeh was arrested in September 2010 and subsequently sentenced to 11 years in prison, later reduced on appeal to six years, and a ten-year ban on her legal practice, on charges of “acting against national security, collusion and propaganda against the regime, and membership in the Defenders of Human Rights Center.” Her prosecution followed her work defending victims of human rights violations in Iran, and she spent three years in prison, at times in solitary confinement, until her release in September 2013.

UPDATE(!): [9,10].

Sotoudeh and Panahi also refer to the lingering paranoia associated with possibly recognizing the voice of their “interrogator”.  This is a reference to the fact that when they were arrested, they were interrogated while blindfolded.  They never saw their interrogators, but the remembered voices have left a lasting stress on them.  As Sotoudeh remarks about their acquired fear of never ending surveillance and the extent to which this, itself, is a form of government instrumented terrorism:

“Sometimes they do it [leave clues of their presence] on purpose so we know they’re watching us.  Such obvious tactics. First they mount a political case. You’re an agent for Mossad, the CIA, MI5. They beef it up with a morality charge. They make your life hell. When you finally get released, the outside world becomes a bigger cell. They make your best friends your worst enemies.”

➔ Social issue: human rights and the rule of law

After dropping off Nasrin Sotoudeh, Panahi goes to Ali’s Spring to find the goldfish bowl lady who had left her purse in his car.  The closing shot of the film, which lasts 4:38, shows Panahi and Hana leaving the taxi to look for the lady, after which a presumed Basiji thug (a paramilitary arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards) approaches the empty cab. He gains entry and wrecks the dashboard camera, but he can’t find the crucial flash drive with the recorded camera footage.  Panahi had apparently prudently taken the flash drive with him.

Note that the social issues associated with these fares all relate to the topic of RMDL which I have discussed elsewhere [11].  RMDL is an acronym standing for

• (Human) Rights. These include freedom of speech and the freedom to watch and listen (essentially freedom of assembly). These are fundamental forms of interaction that must be guaranteed and allowed to flourish. Those who are imprisoned merely for their conscientiously held beliefs become prisoners of conscience.
   
• Markets.  There needs to be regulated exchange markets that allow the open exchange of goods across society.  This includes the necessity of ensuring sufficient wealth equality across society so that there can be widespread, fair exchange of goods and services.
   
• Democracy.  Some form of democracy involving broadly inclusive enfranchisement needs to be in place.
   
• Rule of Law.  There needs to be a written set of laws that are made known to everyone and that can be changed by actions of the democratically-elected legislature. The laws provide regulation of the various interactions in the interests of the public good.

Iran has severe problems with all four of these RMDL categories, and hopefully the efforts of people like Jafar Panahi and Nasrin Sotoudeh will ultimately help to make things better.

It is difficult to discern how much of Taxi is staged, but the situations and issues depicted are real.  And they are ongoing.  Subsequent to the film’s release, Nasrin Sotoudeh was again summoned to appear before the Tehran Revolutionary Court in September 2016 to face unspecified charges [8]. 

When Hana had inquired of her schoolteacher what was meant to “avoid sordid realism”, she was told to show the real, but not the “real real”.  If reality is dark and unpleasant, then one shouldn’t show it.  What Panahi has managed to do in Taxi is to show the “real real” but not in a dark and unpleasant fashion.  He has shown the cordial and hospitable Iranian people trying to cope with their RMDL deficiencies in positive ways.

★★★½

Notes:

1. David Sexton, “Taxi Tehran, film review: enchanting film-making”, Evening Standard, (30 October 2015).  
2. Murtaza Ali Khan, “Banned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's Taxi wins the Golden Bear at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival", A Potpourri of Vestiges, (15 February 2015).    
3. Jugu Abraham, “194. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Farsi/Persian language film 'Taxi' (2015), based on his own original screenplay: Very interesting subject but intriguing cinematic docu-fiction.”, Movies that make you think, (19 June 2016).   
4. Jamsheed Akrami, "The Art of Defiance", Taxi DVD, Kino Lorber, (2015).  
5. A. O. Scott, “Review: In ‘Taxi,’ a Filmmaker Pushes Against Iranian Censorship From Behind the Wheel”, The New York Times, (1 October 2015).  
6. The interestingly severe contrast between the Iranian public space and private space, and the traditional hands-off attitude of the authorities with respect to the private space, has been described in Hooman Majd’s recent book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, Anchor, (2009).
7. There are other references to Panahi’s films in this work.   Omid makes a comment about Crimson Gold (2003) and Hana makes a reference to The Mirror (1997).
8. “Nasrin Sotoudeh: ‘Hardliners are trying to open a new case against me’”, Center for Human Rights in Iran, (22 August 2016).   
9. “Human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh jailed 'for 38 years' in Iran”, The Guardian, (11 March 2019).    
10. “Iranian Human Rights Lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh Says She Has Been Sentenced to 38 Years in Prison”, Center for Human Rights in Iran, (11 March 2019).    
11. See my reviews of Mohammad Rasoulof’s Head Wind (2008) and Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), Satyajit Ray’s An Enemy of the People (Ganashatru, 1989), Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012), and Michael Moore’s Michael Moore in Trumpland (2016).

“Through the Olive Trees” - Abbas Kiarostami (1994)

Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994) was one of the veteran director’s films that first attracted international attention and elevated him to star status.  It was his third film – coming after Where Is the Friend's Home? (Khane-ye Doust Kodjast, 1987) and Life, and Nothing More... (Zendegi va Digar Hich, 1992) – that was shot in and around a rural village in northwestern Iran, Koker, that was the site of a devastating earthquake in 1990.  It was undoubtedly the earthquake, which killed 35,000-50,000 people and injured more than 100,000, that led Kiarostami to revisit Koker and to fashion films that considered what matters in life. These three films set in Koker are sometimes referred to as the “Koker Trilogy”, although Kiarostami, himself, apparently doesn’t consider them to be a trilogy [1].  In fact, though, the three Koker films are definitely linked, and Through the Olive Trees is a story associated with the making of Life, and Nothing More....

Kiarostami is famous for his distinctive cinematic style, which features static long takes, often lasting several minutes, as well as reflective, semi-documentary styled stories that sometimes explicitly self-reference the making of the film that is shown. This has attracted the fascination of some intellectually-oriented international film critics who see his work as examining or questioning the reality of what can be told [2].  But in my view Through the Olive Trees is not so much about the nature of reality as it is about personal engagement.  And that is where its charm lies.  I will try to elaborate on that below.

The story concerns the making of a film (evidently Life, and Nothing More...) in Koker after the earthquake disaster, and it opens with the actor who plays the director of the film to be shot  speaking directly to the camera about the open-call casting interviews he is conducting. Note that the role of the film director, whose name is never given but who presumably represents Kiarostami, is played by the only professional actor in this film, Mohamad Ali Keshavarz.  All the other roles are performed by nonprofessionals, as is customary in Kiarostami films. This includes not only the locals, who simply play themselves, but also members of Kiarostami’s own film crew, such as cinematographer Hossein Jafarian (Crimson Gold, 2003; Fireworks Wednesday 2006; About Elly, 2009; Gold and Copper, 2011) and assistant director Jafar Panahi. 

Following this opening statement to the film’s viewers, the film director turns around and begins scanning the faces of the assembled young ladies hoping to be chosen for a small role in the film.  He clearly has a picture in his mind of what he is looking for, as he briefly queries a few girls before ultimately choosing a young woman named  Tahereh Landanian. We soon learn, though, that Tahereh is somewhat stubborn and self-centered and thus not necessarily the kind of cooperative person who will take direction when the camera is running.  But the film director has his own intuition and has made his choice.

So the beginning of the film establishes the primary narrative thread: the director’s task of making a film in the earthquake-ravaged village, where most of survivors are now living in tents because their homes were destroyed.  For example the task of just creating the right setting of a normal home means having to gather potted plants from neighboring areas, and the director’s rigorously and energetic production manager, Mrs. Shiva, takes care of such details by getting some help from two local boys, Babek and Ahmed Ahmed-Poor (who we might recognize as the principal characters of Where Is the Friend's Home?). 

Getting the locals to act naturally is another problem, and the film director patiently persists through numerous retakes of a simple shot because his local actor stammers in front of women and so cannot utter his few simple lines to Tahereh. (The tediousness of watching these many retakes unconsciously highlights in the viewer’s mind the differences between spontaneous reality and  the artificiality of narrative retelling.)  The film director is finally persuaded to replace the actor with a backup local, Hossein, and so Mrs. Shiva drives away to fetch him.  As she drives back to the filming setup with Hossein in tow, she chats with the man, and this is the beginning of a fundamental shift in the story.  From now on the narrative focalization will primarily be on Hossein.

When they go ahead and reshoot the earlier scene now with Hossein, still another problem emerges to block progress.  It seems that Tahereh is familiar with Hossein and refuses to speak to him.  Hossein explains to the director that just before the earthquake he had proposed to Tahereh’s parents for her hand in marriage, but he had been refused because he was illiterate and didn’t own a house. Tahereh’s parents had perished in the earthquake, but Hossein's reissued proposal to the girl’s grandmother after the quake was also rejected.

But Hossein doesn’t give up.  He is patient and courteous but almost maniacally persistent in his attempts to win his beloved.  Hossein fell passionately in love with Tahereh just because he saw her reading a book one day and thereby knew that she was a well-groomed, literate young woman.  With absolutely no encouragement from the girl – she refuses to speak to him or look at him – the young man stubbornly perseveres in what seems like a hopeless quest.

We now start to get a feeling of what this film is ultimately about and how the two narrative threads, that of the director and that of Hossein, are linked.  The director, who is an observant and reflective sort of person, came to Koker to see how the earthquake had affected the people who lived there.  What he sees and encounters in his various conversations with the locals is that the people remain composed, kindly, and civilized, but the horrors of what has happened seem to have left them withdrawn and resigned to their fate.  They seem almost shell-shocked when they matter-of-factly mention to the director that their spouses and parents perished in the event. 

For example when the director talks to an elderly man named Bagheri who almost offhandedly remarks that his wife was killed in the event, he asks him if he intends to find another companion. No, that wouldn’t be right, Bagheri passively tells the director.  But the director urges him to embrace the life-world in front of him and to reconsider his position.
 

The film director sees that the bulk of the people he meets have stoically survived the quake, but they have become so withdrawn that they will likely miss out on what life further has to offer.  And this is where Hossein offers a contrast to this withdrawn passivity.  The young man is passionately committed to his romantic quest, almost irrationally so. But his passion for engagement is what seems to be lacking among the people around him.  It is this passion for life that the director sees in him and wants somehow to encourage.

Mrs. Shiva’s coercive persuasion manages to get Tahereh to recite her few lines to Hossein, and the filming of their scene is resumed. During the setup when Hossein and Tahereh are momentarily out of sight from the crew, Hossein continues to beseech the young woman to consider his proposal.  But she still refuses to speak to him or even look at him when she is not required to do so by the film script.  Hossein tells her that even though the grandmother has rejected him, he wants to know what she, herself, thinks.  Is it ‘yes’ or ‘no’?  But the girl doesn’t respond.

In some sense we might compare Tahereh’s non-responsiveness to Hossein’s entreaties to the perceived non-responsiveness of God to our prayers.  Just like Hossein, many of us have fashioned a love for God based on very little evidence.  We beg Him (or Her) to love us, or even to give us a sign, any sign, that He hears our pleas.  And when we don’t get any response, we still go on believing and loving Him.  We know He must be the perfect loving Being that we feel within our hearts has to be out there somewhere.  So, like Hossein, we don’t give up.
                   

After the first shot of the scene, Hossein, who also works for the film crew as a servant serves tea to everyone on the film set.  This is presented in a long and memorable 60-second moving-camera shot, with the tea tray always in closeup as Hossein moves about the set.  This was my favorite of the many well-executed long-take shots in this film.

Finally they get setup for the second shot of this sequence [3].  In the take Tahereh refuses to address Hossein as “Hossein Agha” (“Mr. Hossein") as the script required.  But Hossein, ever the gallant gentleman despite his lower-class status, sticks up for her reading, and the film director accepts the shots as a successful “wrap”. 

Now with their parts of the film finished, Hossein and Tahereh get ready with others to be driven back to their homes in a pickup truck.  There is some delay, though, and the impatient Tahereh sets off on foot, using a shortcut she knows about through the olive groves, to catch a minibus.  The film director, noticing her departure and the opportunity to encourage the one passionate local he has seen, suggests to Hossein that he also take that path home.

Hossein sets out in hot pursuit.  This is his last chance to be around the girl.  After he almost catches up with here, there is a four-minute sequence of alternating medium shots of the two of them – Tahereh silently walking ahead and Hossein respectfully following – showing him making his last desperate pleas. Also interested to see if she will ever respond, the film director watches them from a safe distance.  Finally Hossein despondently gives up and appears headed back to the pickup truck. But then he has a last-second, impulsive change of heart and again runs after her.

The final shot, which is the signal moment of the film and lingers in one’s memory long afterwards, lasts four minutes and shows Tahereh walking far away in the distance with Hossein in pursuit.  We finally only see the two of them as little more than little dots in the distance that have almost merged with the arboreal countryside landscape. It is difficult for the viewer to make it out because the principals are such tiny images, but it appears that Hossein catches up with her and perhaps there is some kind of engagement.  Hossein comes rushing back through the meadow toward the camera as the film ends.

There has been considerable commentary about that last shot and what it means.  Did Hossein finally make contact with his god(dess)?  Can we?  All we can be sure about is that the full, soulful engagement between two people is what the film director, Hossein, and we, are always looking for. 

★★★½

Notes:

1. Godfrey Cheshire, “Taste of Cherry”, The Criterion Collection, (31 May 1999).
2. Acquarello, “Through the Olive Trees: Life as Art…as Life”, Senses of Cinema,   (September 2000).
3. Interestingly, if, as indicated by the film clapperboard that is shown, this second shot is to come directly after the previous shot, then it suggests a jump cut will be needed.

"This Is Not a Film" - Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (2011)

Ordinarily I ignore a film’s production backstory, since being mindful of those details undermines my immersion in the diegetic world, and hence the story the filmmaker wants to tell.  But with This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist, 2011) I make an emphatic exception.  In this case the production backstory is essential to the film’s subject – freedom of expression in the face of a despotic regime.

The background story concerns the distinguished Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s arrest and confinement by the Iranian authorities following the widely disputed 2009 Iranian presidential “election”.  Panahi, who had supported the defeated Green Movement candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was arrested shortly afterwards when he attended a cemetery gathering to mourn the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, who had been gunned down on the streets during post-election protests.   Although Panahi was later released from prison, he was banned from leaving the country and was rearrested in March 2010.  Then on 20 December 2010, Panahi was convicted on the charge of plotting to “commit crimes against the country’s national security” and was sentenced to six years in prison and banned for 20 years from “making or directing any movies, writing screenplays, giving any form of interview with Iranian or foreign media as well as leaving the country” [1].  The movie This Is Not a Film was made in March 2011 when Panahi was under house arrest awaiting the results of his legal appeal of this conviction. 

Actually it is amazing that Panahi managed to have a film made at all under these restrictive circumstances.  Here he is, a man arrested and confined in order to stifle his voice and forbidden to engage in any kind of film activity, shown on camera talking about his situation.  This work (not labelled a “film”, of course, but merely an “effort”) is the collaboration of Panahi and documentary filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb.  It was shot during the Nouruz (Iranian New Year) period with the events shown covering Chaharshanbe Souri, the Iranian equivalent of New Year’s Eve.  How they managed to smuggle the finished film out of the country must have been a story in itself, because it was apparently coded onto a flash drive that was concealed inside a birthday cake and was eventually screened at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

This Is Not a Film opens with Panahi shown attending to routine activities inside his apartment.  The focus seems to be on the uneventful tempo of isolated life in the apartment, while outside is heard the sound of explosions, to which Panahi pays no evident attention.  Given the relatively boring nature of Panahi’s activities, the viewer’s attention is naturally drawn to what may be happening outside.  If the noises are a manifestation of some civil disturbance, why is Panahi so unmindful of it?  It soon becomes evident that this day is Chaharshanbe Souri (“Fireworks Wednesday”), because it takes place on the Wednesday before Nouruz, the Iranian New Year’s day.  Chaharshanbe Souri is somewhat like July 4th in the US or like Guy Fawke’s Day in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand: people like to celebrate it with raucous noise and firecrackers.  Actually this day is of far more ancient vintage than its Western counterparts – it is perhaps 4,000 years old, and representative, as is Nouruz itself, of pure Persian culture.  On Chaharshanbe Souri in addition to setting fireworks, people like to make bonfires and leap over them, an act that has some symbolic significance.   It’s also a day that can be seen to represent a certain freedom from routine constraints, even rowdyism, as people engage in celebratory antics on the street.  Not surprisingly, the conservative religious authorities of Iranian society condemn the day and its activities as un-Islamic, but they have so far not been able to suppress its observance.
                           
Relatively early on in This Is Not a Film, Panahi does something that both he (see for example  The Mirror, 1997) and his sometimes collaborator Abbas Kiarostami have done before –  he breaks the “fourth wall” of the film’s “dramatic stage” and begins to talk straight into the camera about the filmmaking going on.  By doing this he actively engages the audience in his concern of how one goes about expressing one’s thoughts in film form.  At first in this film, the shots of Panahi had been photographed by a statically placed camera, but soon his collaborator on this occasion, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, arrives and begins filming Panahi himself.  The subsequent dialogue is then understood to be between Panahi and Mirtahmasb, but we viewers, as silent witnesses, are presumed to be part of the conversation, too.

Panahi now speaks of a film script that he had prepared and for which he had been attempting to get permission to film.  It is based on Chekov’s short story, “From the Diary of a Young Girl” [2]. With the possibility of that filming now closed off, however, Panahi here decides to discuss how that film would have looked in terms of layout and narrative structure.  The proposed script concerns a young woman from a conservative family who wishes to attend college.  Her father in the story forbids her to do that and has her locked up inside the house.  So the film script concerns a girl facing the same kind of suppression that Panahi now faces.  As he describes his plans for this story to Mirtahmasb, we get some interesting insights into various aspects of Panahi’s filmmaking approach.

One of the most interesting, to me, revelations, concerns Panahi’s modest remarks to the effect that he doesn’t know much about the technical details of cinematography.  Filmmakers around the world have varying degrees of expertise at this level, with some being expert camera operators and others leaving the camera work to professional technicians.  For example on this score, I also found it surprising to hear some time ago the accomplished Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi remark that the great Federico Fellini never ever looked through a camera lens.  Nevertheless, given the technical cinematic mastery of Panahi’s previous films and the fact that he has been a film editor in connection with some works directed by others, I would have expected him, in particular, to be highly knowledgeable about film cinematography.

Another interesting stylistic point is the way Panahi schematically maps out his proposed camera setup layout with masking tape on his livingroom rug.  Some filmmakers like to do this kind of thing – a sort of overhead-map style layout of where the camera positions should be – while others envision their films in terms of just what will be seen in the film frame.  These two perspectives, which we may refer to as the “architectural” and the “subjective”, are quite different.  The architectural camera map layout perspective is objectivist, a top-down approach that has an implicit view-from-the-sky attitude that keeps all aspects of the scene in consideration.  The film-frame perspective is local and subjective; it is the perspective of a single observer.  Of course both perspectives are useful in filmmaking, and Panahi does refer to the subjective perspective, too, on various occasions in the film; but it is still a question as to which perspective is preferred by the director. It is my understanding that Michelangelo Antonioni, a visual movement master of both the camera and his players, also preferred to think of the scene from the “architectural” perspective.

Also like Antonioni, Panahi says that he generally constructs his film in response to the environmental context of the story: the setting helps determine the narrative structure.  In fact he usually doesn’t map everything out beforehand, because he wants the film to be partially constructed at the time of the shooting – certain unexpected aspects of the visual narrative may emerge during the filmmaking process. He illustrates this filmmaking aspect by showing clips from two of his earlier works, The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) and Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), which featured unexpected responses on the part of his unprofessional actors that were incorporated into and added to the narratives.  In fact such an emergent event apparently occurs in This Is Not a Film, too, towards the end, when a student moonlighting as a trash collector shows up at Panahi’s door and Panahi then goes on to converse with him in the elevator.  

Panahi’s desire to capture emergent events and incorporate them into his films reflects an emphasis on spontaneity and authenticity.  This underlies his remark that he has always shot his films outdoors because of the Iranian government’s restrictions on women’s dress in films.  Presumably he finds it artificial and unrealistic to show women invariably wearing the hejab in indoor scenes, so he restricts his action to the outdoors.  Like all Iranian filmmakers working inside the country, though, Panahi’s films do not make overt political statements, and there are no villains.  They simply show people trying to cope with the social circumstances in which they find themselves.

Returning to the events of This Is Not a Film, after Panahi discusses the outline of his proposed film for awhile, he loses interest in further discussions of it.  After all, he says, “if we could tell a film, why make a film”.  Compare this to Alfred Hitchcock, who famously remarked that the thrill of making a film was in its planning.  The actual shooting of the film, for Hitchcock, was merely a boring implementation of the film idea and not a creative activity.

The film events in This Is Not a Film finally move to Mirtahmasb making his departure for the evening to attend to his own family’s Nouruz celebration.  But just when  Mirtahmasb is leaving, the young trash collector unexpectedly shows up; and Panahi decides to accompany him as he makes his rounds collecting trash from the various floors in the apartment building.  The young man cautiously, but genuinely, talks about his life, his difficulties finding a job, and other aspects about his life in Tehran.  When the elevator gets to the bottom, where the trash is deposited in larger containers, Panahi’s camera looks out on the wide world that is beyond the apartment gates and is full of joyous fireworks.  On this view the film closes.

Given the constraints in which Panahi had to work, this film is a fascinating and a valuable testament.  I am not aware of Panahi ever having overtly expressed any hostility to the Iranian government, but he has been muzzled and imprisoned.  Iran now has serious issues concerning:

•  basic human rights, such as free expression
•  the rule of law
•  open democracy. 

Besides the film’s backstory, there have been further, ongoing events.  Iran’s Council of Public Culture has declared The Iranian House of Cinema, Iran’s largest professional organization for filmmakers, to be illegal [3].  Mojtaba Mirtahmasb was arrested in September 2011 as he was leaving the country.  In December 2011, Mirtahmasb was released, but in that same month Panahi’s legal appeal of his prison sentence was denied.
★★★★

Notes:

1. "Filmmaker Jafar Panahi Sentenced to Six Years in Prison", The Green Voice of Freedom,  20/12/2010, http://en.irangreenvoice.com/article/2010/dec/20/2581.
2. This is a one-page story, and you may be able to find a copy of it here.
3. Iran Daily Brief, December 29, 2011, http://www.irandailybrief.com/?p=5695

"The White Balloon" - Jafar Panahi (1995)

After studying directing at a film college, making several documentary films, and serving as Abbas Kiarostami’s assistant director in Under the Olive Trees (Zire Darakhatan Zeyton, 1994), Jafar Panahi made his directorial debut in 1995 with The White Balloon (Badkonake Sefid). The film was co-scripted by Kiarostami, who would later also write the screenplay for Panahi’s Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorkh, 2003), and the film followed the customary pattern of Kiarostami’s productions by employing almost exclusively nonprofessional actors essentially playing themselves. But even in this first production, Panahi displayed a mastery for visual narrative and humanistic portrayal that distinguished him from Kiarostami. This distinction is also manifested in their two contrasting camera styles. Kiarostami’s cinematography has often employed static, long-take close-up shots depicting lengthy statements by individual characters, which were frequently intercut with very wide shots depicting the environmental landscape. From the outset, however, Panahi displayed a more fluid and dynamic visual style. He uses moving camera tracking shots so skilfully that they compare to studio shots undertaken on camera tracks, and his dynamic editing maintains an interactive narrative discourse without interrupting the “realist” setting. When you watch The White Balloon, you are seeing the camera work of someone who has already mastered the craft.

Filmmaking in Iran is undoubtedly fraught with extra difficulties, and Iranian filmmakers have always wrestled with the severe restrictions imposed on them by government censors, particularly during the years outside the relatively tolerant and humane period corresponding to Mohammed Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005). In many cases the safest option was to tell stories about children, which led to some creative productions along these lines, such as Kiarostami’s Khane-ye Doust Kodjast? (Where Is My Friend’s Home?, 1987) and Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Bacheha-ye-Aseman, 1997). Panahi’s The White Balloon and his subsequent The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) were additional entries in this Iranian film genre. In the case of The White Balloon, we have almost a textbook case of how one can make a film of interest out of everyday, mundane events. The key to The White Balloon and what makes it charming, though, is that while the events are mundane from an adult’s perspective, they are highly dramatic, with huge ups and downs, from the perspective of the child protagonists.

The story is set on the day before the Iranian New Year (“Nowruz”) and concerns a seven-year-old girl, Razieh, who wants her mother to purchase a colorful goldfish for the festivities. The Iranian Nowruz takes place on the first day of spring and is the principal holiday period in Iran, with the Nowruz holiday season lasting two weeks. It can be compared with Christmas in Western countries, since it is the major gift-giving holiday. This ancient holiday tradition is pres-Islamic and celebrates the annual rebirth of nature. The mythical figure of Nowruz is “Haji Firuz”, who is usually colorfully dressed and in blackface. During this period one often sees figures dressed as Haji Firuz on the street, dancing gaily and making raucous music with tambourines. Iranians traditionally decorate their home with a “haft sin” table that features seven food items that begin with the letter ‘s’ (in Farsi, ‘sin’) which have the symbolic meaning of renewal and good fortune for the coming year. The table also traditionally includes a goldfish in a bowl, symbolic of life. Thus in the spirit of the traditional holiday festivities, Razieh wanted the family haft sin table to display a truly grand goldfish for the occasion.

Note that the Iranian calendar is slightly more accurate than the traditional Western Gregorian calendar, and the moment of New Year takes place precisely at the moment of the vernal equinox. This means that it can happen at any time of the day on the eve of Nowruz. In The White Balloon the viewer is informed that the New Year will begin in less than two hours on that afternoon. The film then proceeds in real time, in the sense that the film duration parallels diegetic time. Thus in the first shot of the film, Haji Firuz clowns are seen on the street while the viewer is informed by an offscreen radio voice that the new year will begin in seventy-eight minutes, and at the very end of the film the same radio voice announces the beginning of the new year..

Although the storyline may at first seem to be somewhat ad hoc, it is actually organized into six structured episodes:

1. Introduction – Wanting a Goldfish (18 minutes). Razieh is seen tagging along after her mother on the street and nagging her about getting a nice, “chubby” goldfish for Nowruz. This scene provides the background for the family home, which is in a compound close to a local bazaar. Razieh’s mother is played by newcomer Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, a superb, natural actress who would later star in The Circle (Dayereh, 2000) and Café Transit (2005). Razieh has an older brother, Ali, who is about ten or eleven, and has a rather demanding father, who is heard but never seen onscreen in the film. Razieh’s mother is busy with holiday preparations and sees no point in purchasing a new goldfish from the market when the family already has a goldfish pond full of fish. But Razieh whines that she is not satisfied with their own ponds’ population of “skinny” goldfish, she wants to buy a chubby one that she saw in the market. Finally after strenuous remonstrations, Razieh gets her way and is given a 500-toman note and told to buy the desired goldfish for 100 tomans. (The “purchasing value” of 500 tomans at that time might have amounted to a couple of dollars.) The task goal for this episode was to get permission to buy the goldfish, which was accomplished The goal is now to go out and purchase the goldfish.
2. The Snake Charmers (7 minutes). Razieh, now wandering towards the bazaar on her own, succumbs to the forbidden temptation of watching two scruffy snake charmers performing in front of a crowd of idlers on the street. The snake charmers immediately incorporate the frightened Razieh into their act and snatch her 500-toman banknote as part of their show. This is a charming scene, and it shows the strange and threatening world outside home, as seen by a young child. After more tears and protests from Razieh, she gets her banknote back and moves on. The goal of this episode was merely to survive the events in tact, and that at least was accomplished. The goal remains to go out and buy the fish.
3. Losing the Money (16 minutes). Razieh makes her way to the fish shop and identifies her “chubby” goldfish, but now another disaster strikes: she has lost her banknote somewhere on the way. A kindly matron offers to help the again-tearful girl, and they retrace Razieh’s steps from the time when she last remembered having the money. They do manage to find it on the street, but it has fallen through a drain grating in front of a closed-up shop. The lady talks to the shopkeeper next door, a busy tailor named “Bachtiari”, who agrees to assist Razieh. But after the lady leaves, Mr. Bachtiari is too preoccupied with arguments in his shop to attend to Razieh, and she doesn’t know what to do. The goal of this episode had been to find the lost money, which was accomplished, but now the remaining task is to retrieve it somehow from the drain.
4. Ali Comes to Help (13 minutes). At this point Razieh’s brother Ali, who has been looking for her, finds her on the street. The older and more assertive Ali tries his hand with Mr. Bachtiari, but he doesn’t make much headway. After a failed attempt to fish out the money from the drain, Ali is merely instructed by Mr. Bachtiari to wait until after the Nowruz season is over when the neighbour shopkeeper is likely to return. This might make sense to an adult, but to the two children it would spell absolute disaster if they were to return home to their demanding parents without the money. Ali then goes off to see if he can find the address of the owner of the closed shop that has their money under its drain grate. So the goal is now to find the missing shop owner.
5. The Soldier (13 minutes). Razieh is now approached by a drafted army soldier from the provinces, who wants to chat with her. This is another scary episode for Razieh, who, like most well-bred young children, has been instructed never to talk to strangers. Indeed the soldier’s motivations are unclear: he might simply be bored and lonely; he may be after the banknote; or perhaps there is something worse on his mind. Gradually he wins Razieh’s confidence against her will, but Ali returns to the scene to terminate their colloquy, and the soldier moves on. Again an uncertain distraction has been dispatched, and the goal remains to recover the money from the drain.
6. The Afghani Boy (11 minutes). Now they spy an Afghani boy selling balloons on the street, and after a scuffle over the boy’s balloon pole, they begin working together to use the pole to retrieve the money from the grating. It is agreed that chewing gum stuck on the end of the pole should do the trick, and Ali is momentarily tempted to steal some gum from a blind street seller. But he changes his mind, and in the meantime the Afghani boy has bought some gum. Quickly the money is then retrieved, and the problem has finally been solved. Their goal achieved, Ali and Razieh joyfully run off to get their goldfish. The final shot shows the abandoned Afghani boy standing there with his one, unsold balloon, a white one.

The charm of The White Balloon is that the “small” world of children is presented precisely in the dramatic way that it is perceived by them. The camera framing and perspectives are entirely from the level of the children and what they see. The narrative mood is sustained by Aida Mohammadkhani’s determined performance as Razieh, which presumably was carefully managed by Panahi.  Her tears in the snake-charmer’s scene appear quite genuine, just as do her sudden flashes of joy when she sees her fish or when her lost money is discovered. All the other performances by the nonprofessional cast also have the look and sound of authenticity. Panahi’s well-crafted mise-en-scene and cinematography make this small story come alive. Although his techniques are different from those of the Italian neorealists, the comparison of this first work of Panahi’s to theirs is apt: they both sought to uncover the humanity of the everyday.

But upon reflection, this small world of children is not really so small, after all. It includes all the fears of the bizarre and the threatening, as well as the anxieties concerning financial ruin and punishment. It also includes the joys of opportunistic encounters and fleeting friendships that all-to-quickly pass away before we know it. It is the same world of human values and experiences that we all live in, whether on the city streets in a country far away or in your own local neighbourhood.
★★★½ 

“Café Transit” - Kambuzia Partovi (2005)

The Iranian film, Café Transit (also known as Border Café, 2005) describes the struggles of a recently widowed mother of two small children in her efforts to live on her own in a traditional male-dominated society. The write and director of the film, Kambuzia Partovi, had earlier written the screenplay for Jafar Panahi’s superb The Circle (Dayereh, 2000), which also covered the theme of women who cannot find a place for themselves within Iranian society. The collaborative association with Panahi continues with this film, because Panahi was the film editor for Café Transit.

The story begins with the young widow, Reyhan, attending to the shutting down of her deceased husband’s roadside “truck stop” café, which is located in western Iran near the Turkish border. According to traditional customs of the local society, she is now expected to marry and move in with her already-married brother-in-law, Nasser, but this is something she doesn’t want to do. Her own background (she comes from another region) does not follow this custom, and, besides, she doesn’t feel any love for Nasser. She prefers to remain an unmarried widow and carry on operating the café on her own. Nasser, however, sees it as his duty to look after his bereft sister-in-law. Gradually it becomes evident, though, that the issue for him is only secondarily a matter a compassion and more a matter of personal honor: he is concerned about losing face in the eyes of the other villagers.

Reyhan is polite and respectful at all times, but she is also determined. She decides to retain the services of her husband’s café assistant, Oujan, and redecorates the place to make it more attractive. The Farsi title of the film is Ghahveh Khaneh, which in English means simply “coffee house”, but here it refers to a kind of café that usually serves relatively simple food to an almost exclusively male patronage. The clientele for such cafés in this area are mostly truckers, many of them European, who are making the long run across Iran and Turkey to deliver goods to and from Europe. Many of these men live away from home for years doing this job, and when they learn that there is now a roadside café with the food and flavour of a “woman’s touch”, they soon flock to be her customers. Such a booming success comes as a further shock to the humiliated Nasser, who operates his own roadside café that is now losing customer’s to that of his sister-in-law.

Nasser increases the pressure on Reyhan to give in to his face-preserving demands, and he eventually turns to the local authorities in an effort to have her place shut down. Throughout all the pressure placed on her, Reyhan remains polite and respectful, but quietly resistant to his demands. Mindful of social restrictions about unaccompanied women appearing before men in public, she remains in the kitchen cooking, hidden from the view of the appreciative drivers who are not even aware that a woman is cooking their meals.

Two additional characters appear as the story proceeds, and they contribute to an external perspective on the events. One is a Greek truck driver, Zakario, who accidentally discovers that the cook of his tasty café meals is a woman, and he gradually becomes romantically attracted to her (despite very few face-to-face meetings). The other outsider is a homeless teenage Russian girl, Svieta, who has fled a war-torn area and is now hitching rides with drivers in hopes of reaching safety in a Western European country. After the penniless Svieta is dumped by a driver at Reyhan’s café, Reyhan offers her shelter and food, and then even employment as an assistant at the café.

Towards the end of the story, Nasser manages to get the authorities to shut down Reyhan’s café and force her in to his own home. But this is not the real end. At the close of the film, Reyhan leaves Nasser’s home, acquires another café directly across the road from Nasser’s café, and opens up for business. The woman has not been beaten.

Although most of the actors and actresses are not professionals and have been drawn from the local area, the two major characters are played by top Iranian performers. Nasser is played sympathetically by Parviz Parastui, one of the most distinguished Iranian actors. Reyhan is played by Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy, who is the wife of director-writer Kambuzia Partovi. Her previous appearances in Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon (Badkonake Sefid, 1995) and The Circle (Dayereh, 2000) had already displayed her considerable talents of projecting an inner tension. In all these films, she acts in a restrained and respectful manner, never displaying the pyrotechnical emotions that one might feel is justified on the basis of the depicted circumstances. And yet her expressive, compassionate face and gaze suggest her true feelings, and this has a powerful emotional effect.

The cinematography in Café Transit is generally effective in what must have been low-budget filming circumstances. On the other hand the narrative scheme of suggestively encapsulating the entire story as a set of flashbacks doesn’t work so well. The film actually begins with separate shots of Zachario and Svieta in the “present” recounting their memories of their time with Reyhan. For both of them, Reyhan had an evidently seminal effect on their lives and how they should live. Yet the significance and depth of their later interactions with Reyhan is not brought out effectively in the ensuing scenes. And the focalization does not come exclusively from Zachario and Svieta: there are many scenes which could not have been witnessed by those two. Overall, the viewer’s main focus of attention and interest is on the fate of Reyhan, herself.

It is possible that the always unpredictable Iranian censorship authorities (who, according to Partovi, excised several scenes from the film) played some havoc with the storytelling. We should be thankful, I suppose, that the censorship authorities allowed the film to be released at all. (More surprisingly, Café Transit turned out to be Iran’s official entry for the US Academy Awards.) Iranian filmmakers generally have to walk a delicate line when discussing the condition of women in their society. They are forbidden from explicitly criticizing the system, but they still often manage to get their points across implicitly. For example, in The Circle, which was banned in Iran, the women in focus are actually criminalized and excluded from society by an essentially corrupt social system. Café Transit, on the other hand, is more mild – the principal character, Reyhan, is severely constrained by society, but is not cast out of it, and she is presented as a favorable moral model in comparison to the “immoral” vagabond, Svieta.

But the Partovi story has its underlying theme, just the same. It would have been easy to present Nasser as an evil, corrupt character who was abusing Reyhan. But this is not what has been done. Nasser is presented as an ordinary, essentially moral, man who is trying to live by the codes of society. In the hearts of everyone of us there lies the bestial and the angelic. Social values are supposed to summon up the angelic within us. But here we see the ordinary man, Nasser, encouraged by social rules to follow in the footsteps of his thuggish brother, Karim. Just as in The Circle, the people executing society’s moral code are not depicted as inherently evil – they are not essentially corrupt. What is corrupt is any system that evokes the most bestial instincts of man to (a) reduce women to servitude, (b) harm the innocent, and (c) crush dissent and close off the free exchange of ideas.
★★★