While remotely directing a film across the Iran/Turkey border, Jafar
Panahi finds himself caught in a small village's scandal.
Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Jafar Panahi
Starring: Jafar Panahi, Naser Hashemi, Vahid Mobasri, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Khosravani
Like the recent
Return to Dust, Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is another auteur driven
product where the reception of the film, and any ensuing discourse,
threatens to be overwhelmed by the film’s oppressive context. In the case
of No Bears, however, the link between the film, its inhibited production and how
audiences will acknowledge Panahi’s narratives, is a deliberately
explicated and essential aspect of its ideology.
No Bears opens upon a daytime Tehran street, replete with an
eyebrow raising bricolage of Middle Eastern signifiers: a steaming tureen,
al fresco cafes and a fella actually playing a kaval. The chromatic
mise-en-scene betrays the opening’s thrillery genre situation, as it
focuses on Zara (Mina Kavani), given a stolen passport by her
fella, which will allow her to flee to Europe. Except Zara doesn’t want to
leave without him...
And then, ‘CUT!’, we transition abruptly to the home editing studio
of film director Jafar Panahi (played by film director Jafar Panahi), who
is orchestrating the drama via remote technology. Oh, Jafar! You had us!
This New-Wavey opening not only establishes No Bears’ dual narratives - Zara and Bakhtiar’s struggles and Panahi’s
coextending telling of the story as he gets accidentally involved with a
social transgression in his hideaway village - but establishes
No Bears’ alluring tone, too, wherein the most serious of matters are treated
with a winning lightness of touch. As of July this year, the real life
Panahi was arrested and jailed, for six years, under a 2010 conviction of
"assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the
country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic."
The sentence also entailed a 20-year ban on making or directing any
movies, writing screenplays, giving interviews to media, or leaving Iran -
since the conviction, Panahi has contributed undeterred to 10 film
projects. No Bears was filmed guerrilla style and in secret.
You’ve got to give it to him.
Like the real life Panahi, No Bears finds the filmmaker in
exile, and parallels the ramifications of his persecution. In contrast to
the life/death situation his characters face (or are they characters? The
film within a film is presented with a lightheaded blending of documentary
and narrative cinema; are the cameras capturing events or creating them?
Does it matter?), Panahi finds himself embroiled in a low-key village
antagonism involving a love triangle involving two men and a woman: one
man betrothed to her at birth, as per local custom, while the other is the
fella whom she is actually in love with. The patriarchal leaders of the
village believe, on the account of a snot-nosed kid, that Panahi has
photographed the two lovers, and demand his footage and his testimony. As
if, The Patriarchy. In film, as irl, Panahi is not for turning.
The focus on this minor social more, magnified by archaic and wilful
bureaucratic inference, uncovers, through the scrutiny of exposure, the
absurdity of the process. Throughout, Panahi is an equable figure, more
bemused than threatened by the proceedings. Likewise, his
film-within-a-film encroaches upon farce, where certain figures won’t face
the lens, and other times the scene holds on waiting characters
while their counterparts get a safe distance from being on camera. All the
while we get the sense of life, lovely life with lovely people - the woman
with a cat whom Panahi befriends, the glittering lights of just faraway
Tehran - carrying on. Restrictions are man-made, the film breezily
implies, with arbitrary, archaic limitations imposed only by certain
governments.
Life carries on, that is, until it doesn’t, and the devastating
conclusions of both women’s choices eventually come to pass. Panahi’s good
cheer and the warmth of No Bears’ storytelling can only carry its plot implications so far before
crushing reality bears down. We end with a haunting image of frustration
and entrapment.
If you feel strongly about the detainment of Panahi, and fellow Iranian
filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Aleahmad, then there is a
Change.org petition to protest their arrest
here.
No Bears is in UK/ROI cinemas from
November 11th.