Director: Jafar Panahi
Time: 1 hour and 46 minutes
Where Can I Get It: In theaters, soon to streaming
What It Evokes: Questions about home, narrative construction, and the customs that endure
We’re back. Perhaps weekly.
Sight & Sound’s latest “Greatest Films of All Time” list didn’t include a work by Jafar Panahi—fair enough, it’s only 100 films—though it seems to me you could argue the point. Happily, the auxiliary directors’ list made space for three Iranian entries (Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Taste of Cherry, alongside Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation), whereas the “definitive” ranking (i.e. the critics poll) only featured Close-Up. (Comparison between the directors’ and critics’ lists remains fascinating.) Early in his career, Panahi worked as an assistant director to Kiarostami and one finds clear resonances between a work like Close-Up’s formal inventiveness, inclusion of “documentary” aspects, casting of non-actors, and technical ingenuity and later Panahi films. However, unlike Farhadi and Kiarostami, Panahi has never made films outside Iran. Instead, Panahi’s increasingly precarious relationship to the Iranian regime (encompassing domestic bans on his films’ distribution, a prohibition on filmmaking, house arrest, and currently prison time) has resulted in recent works that question the very nature of film as process, medium, and technological construction. His early work tended toward character rich explorations of quotidian events—which, even when not explicitly political, can be a dangerous game. In spite of real constraints and personal risk, his more self-reflexive later films have continued to embody a profound generosity. Even characters engaged in ethically dubious pursuits never come in for ridicule. As his work has grown more interested in interrogating film as a medium, Panahi has resorted to playing versions of himself on screen. His self-presentation usually encapsulates bemusement, observational distance, and inquisitiveness, only heightening the contrast with an impersonal, humorless, and “authoritative” state.
In No Bears, Panahi plays a director unable to leave Iran, leading a film crew based just across the border in Turkey through remote video calls. As such, the film juxtaposes two narratives: a “film” centered on a couple (Zara and Bakhtiar) aiming to migrate to Europe and confronting their own separation when only one can locate a forged passport, and Panahi’s own experience in a village in northwestern Iran. Over time, the film within a film breaks down as the lives of the “actors” begin to parallel their film’s storyline. As a result, moviemaking’s potential dishonesty and deceit, the camera’s innate voyeurism, and art’s inability to take full account of life’s complexity come under scrutiny. Meanwhile, cloistered in a small village, Panahi remains the consummate outsider: urbane, urban, Azeri-Iranian—an object of fascination and suspicion. While spending a day photographing, Panahi may or may not capture a picture of a young couple, Gozal and Solduz, who aim to elope in violation of Gozal’s village-sanctioned betrothal. Customs that both constrain and structure lives come under the strain of independent desire. Home emerges as a space of literal and figurative confinement. At a certain moment in the film, Panahi is driven to the Turkish border (a mountainous no-man’s land peopled by invisible smugglers) and offered the opportunity to step out of Iran. When told he’s standing on the unmarked border, he stumbles backwards into his own country. What does it really mean to leave?
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Panah Panahi (Jafar’s son) ‑ Hit The Road (2021)
Jafar Panahi ‑ This Is Not a Film (2011)