Iranian Director Jafar Panahi More Than a Martyr

Iranian director Jafar Panahi and his clashes with the Islamist mullahs are causing another stir in the international film world. His short film “The Accordion” was scheduled last week to open this year’s Venice Film Festival, but the Iranian government would not let him leave the country to attend. Earlier this year, Panahi was kept in jail during the Cannes Film Festival where he had been invited to sit on the jury. The still-pending charges surround trying to make an anti-government film.

He is not taking it lying down, either, telling Agence France-Presse in Tehran that the mullahs “have a problem with me personally.”Panahi also told AFP that even though he had been released on bail shortly after Cannes, he had been officially banned from making films and traveling abroad, which just makes the whole country one big jail. “When a filmmaker is not allowed to make films, it is as if his mind was still imprisoned. Maybe he is not locked up in a small cell, but he keeps wandering in a much bigger jail,” he said.

Unlike some political martyrs, though, Panahi is worth celebrating and getting to know on artistic grounds, by conservatives and other Americans, even those who don’t often go to or rent foreign or “art” films. He is no talentless provocateur or a mere stick with which to beat the mullahs (justifiably, do I need to add?) about their rhetorical heads. He has won major prizes at the world’s three most prestigious juried festivals – Berlin, Cannes and Venice. He makes accessible and generally entertaining films about the mullahs’ treatment of women. Perhaps worse yet in the eyes of Ahmadinejad and Co., Panahi portrays ordinary Iranians and even sometimes the regime’s enforcers as just unenthusiastically going along to get along. Through such surface subjects as a child’s desire for a goldfish, some women’s efforts to see a soccer game, and a man’s hopes to prove himself worthy of marrying his love, he makes powerful films about frustration in the face of official corruption and social indifference.

Panahi’s first internationally released feature, 1995’s “The White Balloon,” was made in the vein of several Iranian films at that time – a neorealist-flavored film about children, a “safe” subject that wouldn’t be affected by the mullahs’ stifling content codes. But there’s nothing “childish” about “The White Balloon” and its protagonist’s wish for a goldfish – one of the “big, fat ones.” It uses the classic Aristotelian unities – set in a few blocks’ space on the afternoon before the New Year’s celebration and happening more-or-less in real time — to create a universe that is as both as narrow and as big as a child’s world. It also displays Panahi’s masterful abilities with offscreen space and sound effects — we feel like we know the girl’s father, even though he’s never seen (one of the “work-arounds” many Iranian film-makers use, just as Hollywood directors did under the Hays Code). The family is portrayed in an utterly realistic manner – the parents and children love each other, while getting on one another’s nerves and not for laughs. And the most dreaded fate for a child is your mom learning that you lost a 500-toman note. Panahi the writer also undercuts the girl’s insistence on this fish in the gentlest way possible without violating the girl’s illusion. There are several other excellent Iranian movies in this vein by directors other than Panahi – Majidi’s “Children of Heaven” and Kiarostami’s “Where Is My Friends Home.” Many conservatives say that we want clean movies about kids that take seriously both their innocence and their curiosity, and that Hollywood doesn’t make them any more – well, Iran does.

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“Crimson Gold,” made in 2003, starts with its climactic scene — a brutal jewelry store robbery by a big shambling guy named Hossein done in a single riveting shot while the camera hardly moves (except for a subtle zoom) and all the bloody action and disturbing noises pour in from offscreen or spill into the frame, as if by happenstance. Then the film flashes back (think the basic structure of “Sunset Boulevard”) and becomes a deceptively light picaresque social comedy about Hossein’s days and nights of a Tehran pizza delivery man, the people he runs into and especially his best buddy, a talkative little guy named Ali, whose sister Hossein wants to marry – the pair are basically an Iranian Mutt and Jeff. Hossein has to present her with gold jewelry – but his inability to do so is deeply humiliating in a society that is both honor-based (gold symbolizes his manly ability to provide and protect) and centered on Islam (which preaches egalitarianism, at least among Muslim men).

One sequence in particular serves as a metaphor for most of Panahi’s concerns. Tehran’s religious police seal off a block where people in one apartment are having an immoral party (booze, dancing, the mixing of the sexes … those sorts of wickednesses). They plan to arrest the partiers as they leave, so as to get as many as possible without a ruckus. Hossein enters the block unwittingly, trying to deliver pizzas to another apartment in the same building. But now the police arrest Hossein and take his cell phone for fear he’ll alert the partygoers by phone. And they do the same to everyone who wanders into the block, leaving Hossein with nothing to do but politely badger the cops to let him go while they have other things on their mind. And while the arrests pile up, Hossein tries to dispose of his pizzas among the cops and among the other passers-by being held incognito. It’s not subtle and it’s darkly humorous, but if you have a taste for metaphor, this 15- or 20-minute sequence seems prophetic in light of Panahi’s recent travails and the whole crackdown on the Green Movement.

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While “Crimson Gold” was about several things other than the regime’s restrictions on women (class humiliation, mostly), that subject has provided Panahi with the premises of his two most internationally praised films — “The Circle” from 2000 and “Offside” from 2006. While the former film won the Golden Lion top prize at Venice, it struck me as didactic and repetitive, following one character to another without their ever really becoming characters we care about. It’s easily my least favorite film of Panahi’s, though I feel constrained to add that this is a minority view among fans of international and art-house cinema. But in “Offside,” which won a Silver Bear at Berlin he took a huge leap forward by presenting a particular group of  Iranian womentrying to do a single, specific thing that men take for granted (though obviously it stands for more than itself) — getting into Tehran’s national soccer stadium for a World Cup qualifying game against Bahrain. The simple premise gets developed to the fullest in the course of game time, which you can hear as the women are being detained in a holding pen at the stadium. And like the vice raid in “Crimson Gold,” plausible specifics illustrates how Iranians live with, or don’t live with, or undermine the theocratic regime — the best example being a lengthy sequence in which one of the women has to go to the bathroom. Of course, there are no ladies’ rooms, but the woman insists there be no men in the bathroom, i.e., it be otherwise empty (anyone who’s been to a major sporting event knows how difficult that is). All the while the guard wants to keep the woman’s identity as a woman secret because he’s still bound by the stadium rules (all genius moves by Panahi, in using the Islamist codes to undermine themselves. And let’s say the solution involves a mask).

But the ending is what makes “Offside” a truly great work, and perhaps THIS is the worst thing about Panahi in the eyes of Ahmadinejad and Co. Certainly, from the standpoint of today, it too looks prophetic. Panahi told AFP last week, “I am in love with my country, and despite all its limitations I would never want to live elsewhere.” If there is going to be regime change in Iran, it will have to be made by Iranians, and thus on the grounds of Iranian patriotism, in some or other form. Throughout “Offside,” Panahi has shown the women reacting to the game’s events in the manner of patriotic Iranian supporters, chanting “Iran forever” and singing the same songs the men do. Not only does theocratic repression not stifle national pride, but at the very end, which I won’t spoil, such national pride even offers a space for dissent and undermining such tyranny. And God bless him, here and generally throughout his work, Panahi never pushes that point explicitly, though it’s metaphor-wise as plain as day.