“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.
★★★

"The Circle" - Jafar Panahi (2000)

With his third film, The Circle (Dayereh, 2000), Jafar Panahi established himself in the top rank of world film directors. His two earlier films, White Balloon (Badkonake Sefid, 1995) and The Mirror (Ayneh, 1997) had been well-received films about children, but bore the stamp of his earlier collaboration with Abbas Kiarostami. Indeed, The Mirror showed considerable innovation in its attempt to break out of the narrative confines of the Iranian child-centred movie. In The Circle, however, we see something strikingly new emerge.

The story begins in the waiting room of a Tehran hospital maternity ward, where an older woman is waiting to learn about the newborn child of her daughter, Solmaz Gholami. When informed that the child is a girl, the grandmother expresses dismay and fear that the son-preferring in-laws will abandon her daughter. The camera follows her exiting disconsolately out of the hospital and onto the street, where she passes three young women nervously crowded around a public telephone booth. At this point the narrative shifts to these three women, and the grandmother’s story is abandoned.

Thus begins the first of the four main narrative threads of the film. Each narrative thread is picked up in the middle of some unexplained context and left unresolved, as we are passed, as if by chance, to the succeeding thread. It is clear in this new thread that the three women are urgently trying to contact some friend, but are also concerned about being picked up and arrested by the police. Very soon, one of the three is picked up, and the other two women run away down the street. The story proceeds along a path of extreme slow-disclosure, because it is only after 37 minutes of running time that our suspicions are confirmed – we learn that these women have been released from prison on temporary leave and that they are now trying to make their permanent escape. In the case of the two remaining girls of this thread, their hope is to make their way to the home village of the younger of the two, Nargess. Since the girls do not have proper identification and they are not accompanied by any male relatives, their situation on the street is always precarious. We never learn what their original crimes were, but as the film progresses one gets the feeling that in this society merely being a woman is attached with some degree of guilt.

In order to get money for the bus ticket to Nargess’s village, the older girl, Arezou, apparently prostitutes herself and gives the money to Nargess, saying that she will remain behind. About to board the bus a few minutes later, Nargess sees that the police are checking IDs, and she runs away from the bus terminal, hoping to find her friend, Pari, another fugitive from prison. She does make it to Pari’s home, and soon the second narrative thread picks up Pari’s story and abandons Nargess. One soon suspects that Pari’s crimes were political, since we learn that her husband was executed in prison, and the now-four-months-pregnant Pari is hoping to find an abortion on the outside. Pari visits some acquaintances that she had made in prison, but they are barely able to cope with their own situations and are unable to offer much help. Soon, we are passed to the third narrative thread, a single-mother who has dressed up her daughter and left her in front of a hotel in hopes that she will be adopted by a respectable family. Dejectedly walking away from watching her daughter getting picked up by the police and taken away, she sees a male driver stop and offer her a lift. She gets in the car, knowing the suggestive nature of the act, but is startled to learn that this driver is in fact a zealous police officer who has been trawling for prostitutes and is arresting her for prostitution.

This police officer soon stops to talk to some fellow officers about another driver who has been stopped with an unrelated woman, and in the ensuing confusion, our single-mother gets out of the car unnoticed and escapes. Now we are to follow the fourth narrative thread, that of this new woman, evidently a hardened professional prostitute this time, who is being arrested for being with an unrelated man in a car. The driver of that car manages to talk his way out of arrest, but the new woman of our focus is bundled off on a police bus and taken to a prison. When she arrives, she is put into a cell, and the camera silently pans around the cell to reveal that her cell-mates include all the other fugitive women from the earlier three narrative threads. They have failed in their efforts to find freedom and are now in prison. Finally, a cell-door window is opened and some officer from outside calls to the women inside asking if Solmaz Gholami is present. Thus we learn that the woman who gave birth to a girl in the opening scene of the film has apparently been abandoned, and she, too, has wound up in prison. The circle has been closed.

The Circle attracted immediate attention on release and won the Golden Lion at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, along with numerous other international film awards. The fact that it was banned in Iran brought it to the attention of even more people, and many critics viewed the film through the lens of international politics. Certainly viewers from all societies can identify with the plight of people seeking to move about freely. Paradoxically, though, Panahi, himself, ran into those problems in a society, the US, that boasts of its particular freedoms for individuals: once when changing planes in New York while en route from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires, he was detained in shackles for 12 hours because he didn’t want to be fingerprinted. What I would like to discuss further here, though, is not the political issues, but some of this film's special merits as a viewing experience and why I think it qualifies as a work of genius.

Although the film features continuous moving camera shots of people on the city streets, I must again emphasise, as I did in my review of his preceding work, The Mirror, how significantly Panahi’s cinema style differs from the rough-and-ready style of on-the-spot documentary filmmaking. Panahi slyly demonstrated those differences in The Mirror, when he interrupted that film to show the contrast between his own visual narrative style and that of fly-on-the-wall documentarians. In The Circle, again, the shots are carefully composed and structured. This is how Panahi holds our visual attention for a full ninety minutes while we are watching young women wandering, seemingly aimlessly, on the street. Panahi is constantly moving the narrative along, even though one thread is dropped without resolution and another one picked up. There are extraordinarily long tracking shots that smoothly, and without cutting, follow the women around as they gaze at their surroundings, and yet all the while they manage to keep the women in frame and, at the same time, provide point-of-view references concerning what they see. This camera movement is not jarring or confusing, but is instead highly crafted to motivate the viewer's attention. Not only are the women moving about in the early part of the film, but the camera is moving around them, too, and in an artful manner. All of these circular, moving shots perpetuate the metaphor of the movie’s title. Later, there is a three-minute-long tracking shot of the single-mother walking along the street and then getting into and riding along in the unmarked car of the policeman. Throughout this shot, the woman is perfectly in frame in medium close-up. The viewer’s appreciation for this woman’s inconsolable depression builds over the length of this doleful shot, and this would not have been as effective if the shot had been carelessly handled.

Another cinematic feature is the metaphor of confinement and entrapment. Women in this society without the proper identification cannot buy a bus ticket, cannot register at a hotel, and cannot even smoke in public (men are not so restricted). Throughout the film, several of the women protagonists are never able to find a place where they can just catch a moment to smoke a cigarette. Each of the four narratives has a context, a scope, of interactive possibility. But as we proceed, each succeeding narrative is confined to an ever-smaller scope. In the first narrative, Arezou and Nargess are running about on the street and have a relatively wider scope of freedom. In the second narrative, Pari is more confined, but can still range across the city. In the third narrative, the single-mother is only seen walking along the sidewalk. In the final narrative, the prostitute is confined to the dimensions of her seat in the prison bus. This succession of increasing confinement has a cumulative, subconscious effect that makes the dystopian world of the women every bit as ominous and disturbing as Orwell’s 1984. Yet in The Circle we are not in a fantastic or futuristic world with carefully designed sets and artificial environments, but are instead in the here-and-now, and on the street with real, everyday people. In fact only two of the players in The Circle had professional acting experience, and only one of those two, Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy (Pari), has a significant role in the film. But all of the actors and actresses come across as realistic individuals.

Panahi’s The Circle is a bravura performance, and when watching it, I get the feeling that I am viewing the exploration of new cinematic narrative structures.
★★★★