After making films for years while on conditional release from prison, some of them shot in his own or someone else’s apartment (This Is Not a Film 2011, Closed Curtain 2013), in a moving vehicle (Taxi 2015) and in a remote Iranian village (3 Faces in 2018), director Jafar Panahi returns to village life in a context of heightened drama in No Bears (Khers Nist). Even more directly than in his previous films, he portrays himself as he is — a filmmaker hamstrung in his movements by the Iranian authorities, whose heroic determination not to bow his head and stop shooting is on a par with film characters battling a life-changing handicap or illness. This level of self-referential autobiography leaves little room for the viewer to separate Panahi the man from the character he is playing, so effectively are the lines between reality and fiction blurred.
Adding to the illusion is the very real fact that Panahi is now back in Evin prison, the regime’s leading “hotel” for political prisoners who dare to speak out and question its decrees. He was arrested on July 11 after demanding news from a Tehran court about the fate of two other Iranian directors, Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, arrested for protesting the deadly collapse of a building in Abadan. Although all this happened after the completion of No Bears, it will be uppermost in the audience’s mind while watching a scene in which the director toys with leaving the country with the aid of some friendly human traffickers. D.P. Amin Jafari’s outdoor night shooting turns this classic scene of temptation on a mountain, in which Panahi is shown a twinkling city of lights spread out in Turkey, into a frightening decision of great consequence.
Like Panahi himself, the director in the movie is forbidden to travel outside Iran. That is why he is camped out in a peasant village close to the Turkish border: he wants to be near his film crew and actors, who are working on the other side. Because he can’t join them, he vicariously directs the drama from his laptop computer tethered to his phone. But adding to the frustration of not being on the set is the whimsical network connection that comes and goes. When there’s no signal, his A.D. Reza is left to his own devices blocking out scenes and directing the main actors, Zara and Bakhtiar.
In this film-within-a-film, they play a pair of desperate Iranian lovers with a past of arrest, torture and exile, and who search for false passports to start over in Europe. But they can only find one passport — only one of them can leave. The greater drama, however, is that this is the “real” story of the two actors, who are basically playing themselves and are really teetering on the edge of despair. So the very old moral question arises: what is a movie’s responsibility towards real people and their plights? How engaged should the director and crew be in the lives of the people around them?
In line with all his work, particularly since Taxi, Panahi puts across complex ideas and serious quandaries in simple film language, paring down the set and action (probably also out of necessity) to a bare minimum. It gives his late films a lightness that makes them easy to watch and engage in. Here the director’s polite, often humorous interactions with the villagers (who speak Azeri and dress in the colorful folk costumes of the Turks) offers mild comic relief from the increasingly darker themes of his screenplays. Two well-drawn characters are his poor landlord who is honored by his presence in his humble rooms, and the mayor, who keeps local brawls under control by invoking ancient traditions he doesn’t believe in.
So it feels very natural when the director stumbles across another star-crossed romantic couple. The girl, Ghozal, has been traditionally promised in marriage to one boy during – think of it – the cutting of her umbilical cord at birth. Now that she’s older, she prefers another boy. It’s a situation that has the whole village in an uproar and the director is dragged into the dispute by a nine-year-old who claims he photographed the illicit couple under a walnut tree. Though the photography-as-evidence theme doesn’t go far, the incident has a tragic conclusion that threatens to entangle the director with the police, even the Revolutionary Guard. Once more Panahi finds himself faced with a moral dilemma to fight or flee, and this time his decision seems clear. It is a brilliant shot to end a movie on.
Director, producer, screenplay: Jafar Panahi
Cast: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobaseri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani, Reza Heydari
Cinematography: Amin Jafari
Editing: Amir Etminan
Production design: Babak Jajaie Tabrizi
Costume design: Leyla Siyahi
Production company: JP Production
World Sales: Celluloid Dreams
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Farsi, Azeri, Turkish
107 minutes