Movie Enthusiast Issue 66: How to Make a Movie When You’re Banned by Law from Filmmaking
Watching
3 Faces (2018)
Every winter the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler Galleries and the AFI Silver host the DC Iranian Film Festival. Because of the government shutdown I had lost track of whether it was still going to happen this year, though by chance I discovered on the day it was showing that Jafar Panahi’s newest movie would still screen at the AFI.
For some reason 3 Faces was presented not only as part of the Festival, but also as part of a lecture series hosted by a film and theater professor from the local community college. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the series selection (which included both If Beale Street Could Talk, still playing in theaters at the time, and the 1938 Frank Capra film You Can’t Take It With You). When the professor arrived to introduce the screening, he revealed his shared perplexity. “So I don’t know anything about this movie we’re about to watch,” he said ominously, “but so-and-so at the AFI told me I had to include it in this series, so here we are.
“How many of you have seen that movie A Separation?” Most of the hands in the audience of 35 or so people go up. “Wow! You all are going to be better at leading this discussion than I am!” I make a mental note to sneak out as soon as the end credits begin to roll. “Now A Separation is the only movie from Iran I’ve ever seen. And what was really powerful for me about that movie, is how Iranians are just like us. Who do I mean by ‘us’? Americans. You know what stuck out to me the most in that movie? When they showed their kitchen, they have an electric dishwasher!” My silent screams intensify.
3 Faces opens with a video, shot on an iPhone, of a teenage girl telling a sob story addressed to a famous Iranian actress (whose phone number she has somehow acquired). The girl wants to go to Tehran, where she can study to become an actress. Her family considers this to be a dishonorable profession, and they have refused to let her leave the village, where they believe she has a duty to stay and serve the community. After a minute it becomes clear that this is actually a suicide note, that the girl is rowing a rowboat over to a noose she has fashioned for herself in a grotto. She picks her phone up off the edge of the boat where she had propped it up, then the phone falls from her hands as the boat drifts away from underneath her feet.
From this riveting three minutes of “cinema” we cut to a close-up on Behnaz Jafari, the actress addressed in the video, as she plays it back on her phone. She’s riding passenger seat in a car at night, peppering her offscreen chauffeur (director Jafar Panahi) with questions. Who found the girl’s phone and sent this video? If the girl had an accomplice, then is she really dead or was it all just an act? (She did want to be an actress…) If the video was edited to make the suicide attempt and the dropping of the phone appear unsimulated, how did a kid out in the country manage to make it look so professional? With no answers forthcoming and nobody responding to the number that sent the video, Jafari and Panahi have decided to drive out to the girl’s village to solve the mystery
When 3 Faces begins, it seems plausible that this movie could have been entirely unscripted. By the end, it seems that almost everything in the movie is scripted (although this raises some follow-up questions). Continuing a trick he used in his 2015 film Taxi, Panahi has inserted himself into this movie as a deliberate diversionary tactic, to draw attention away from the fact that he is still pulling all the strings. The camera stays mounted on the car dashboard for most of the film, yet as it swivels and pans it always stops in just the right spot, framing everyone perfectly. And what are we to make of Jafari’s role? She appears to be shaken by the video, but she is an actress, a professional at feigning emotions. What makes 3 Faces compelling isn’t just that the story is an interesting mystery in and of itself, but that, as it proceeds, Panahi inserts more and more details that call attention to the film’s construction as a film, right down to the (apparently) nonprofessional actors in the village.
This Is Not a Film (2011)
In 2010 Panahi received a 6-year jail sentence from the Iranian government and was banned from directing films and writing screenplays for 20 years. This has not stopped his output, clearly; 3 Faces is the fourth feature attributed to him since his arrest. (My work supervisor, whose father is from Iran, explained to me that the Iranian government isn’t competent enough to uphold the terms of Panahi’s sentence. Nor are they incentivized to do so, since his movies have been good publicity for the country and its cultural production…in a way.) By 2010, Panahi had already garnered a reputation for criticizing the Iranian government—specifically its treatment of women and the limited opportunities available to young women especially. Though his films had been received well internationally, all or most of them were banned in Iran. What precisely precipitated his arrest and the filmmaking ban is unclear to me. Wikipedia indicates that a series of incidents from 2009 on culminated in a charge of “propaganda against the regime,” and that’s that.
This Is Not a Film appeared at the Cannes Film Festival by surprise in 2011, delivered to France in a USB drive hidden in a birthday cake that had been smuggled out of Iran. The film, such as it were, depicts a day in Panahi’s life under house arrest as he makes various phone calls and talks to his camera-operating assistant (Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) as he tries to appeal his sentence. It’s an interesting sketch, but any excitement the movie provides is mostly extrinsic, owing to the viewer’s knowledge that the movie was made under extenuating circumstances. This Is Not a Film ends with Panahi grabbing the camera and following an acquaintance out of the apartment for an extended 15-minute-long elevator ride where the two stop at every floor in the building to collect Panahi’s neighbors’ trash. Even for me this is a difficult scene to stay awake for, especially in comparison to the more narratively thrilling 3 Faces.
Several months after This Is Not a Film premiered at Cannes, Panahi’s sentence and the ban were upheld. He continues to live under house arrest, continuing to break the law by making new movies every few years and deliberately pushing the boundaries of what “house arrest” really means. Each new film he makes under his increasingly unclear circumstances render This Is Not a Film more of an interesting document than an interesting movie.
Offside (2006)
As of yet I had never seen any of the movies from Panahi’s pre-banned period, so I went and found the only one that was readily available. For Offside, the last feature he had completed before This Is Not a Film, Panahi attended a World Cup qualifying match to make a film about girls who disguised themselves as men in an attempt to sneak into the stadium to watch the match. (Women are banned by law from entering football stadiums in Iran.) The premise came to him from his daughter, who once tried to do the same.
This movie has a great concept, and true to the style of Panahi’s later movies it is sometimes tricky to parse what has been scripted and what hasn’t (especially given the apparent danger the girls would be in in this scenario). It’s not the most interestingly shot movie, which made paying attention on home video a bit of a challenge. The girls who try sneaking in all get found out, of course, but rather than eject them from the premises the young soldiers on duty toss them in a makeshift pen and lazily keep watch over them. One of the girls, stressed out by this whole state of affairs, naturally has to go to the bathroom; as there are obviously no women’s washrooms in the arena, one of the soldiers has to come up with an elaborate series of ploys to escort her, unseen, to the men’s room and back. The movie’s short and sweet. You get to choose for yourself how angry to be over the sexism of the Iranian government.
Closed Curtain (2013)
Reflecting on all these movies, I began to wonder just how “effective” any of them are at achieving Panahi’s goals. What exactly does he hope to accomplish as an artist? How much does he think his art will help end injustice? How easily can his fellow Iranians acquire illegal copies of his movies to watch for themselves? I still need to track down Crimson Gold and The Circle for a fuller picture of Panahi’s growth as a politically active artist. Still, it has been interesting to trace the development of his moviemaking post-arrest.
The second movie Panahi completed after the government ban on his filmmaking was available to stream on Kanopy, so I dutifully fired it up to round out this newsletter. There are seven minutes remaining as I type this! It is not a very interesting movie. Closed Curtain takes about 20 minutes to establish the premise and the premises—a friend of Panahi’s arrives at a beachfront house with his dog, sets up a bunch of curtains to obscure all views of the outside world and to cover up the walls and, thus, the identity of the house’s owner. Eventually a mysterious woman, on the run from the authorities and allegedly suicidal (a recurring theme, I see!) turns up and throws the man’s routine into havoc.
This is really the kind of movie you need to prepare yourself for with a trip to the theater. (Besides, how could I possibly stay focused on this thing knowing that I still needed to write this newsletter?) It is interesting for me to note, nonetheless, how Closed Curtain fits into the progression of Panahi’s post-ban filmmaking. Whereas This Is Not a Film feels improvised on the spot, Closed Curtain is clearly a much more labored affair. The curtains come down about halfway through the movie, revealing that the house belongs to Panahi, who also emerges from some unsuspecting back room and becomes a character in the back half of the movie. Taxi, which followed this film in 2015, is a movie that rides and dies on its concept. There, Panahi plays a cab driver and records with his dashboard camera a day in the life of ferrying people all over Tehran. The passengers comprise everyone from the victim of a hit-and-run who needs to be rushed to the hospital to a pair of old ladies trying to keep their goldfish from spilling out of their respective bags as the car goes over an interminable series of bumps in the road (infrastructural repair does not appear to be the Iranian government’s strong suit either).
3 Faces is the natural evolution of this series of films and, in my opinion, the strongest of them all. It takes the concepts of its predecessors—a feature-length piece of cinema that self-referentially disavows its identity as a film; Panahi appearing as a character in the film and using remote-controlled car cameras to hide the nature of his role as director; obscuring the written nature of the film with nonprofessional actors and naturalistic dialogue, while drawing attention to the screenplay with intentional narrative devices—but it doesn’t sacrifice its more conceptual aspirations for the sake of entertainment.
I don’t think anyone could have imagined in 2010 that the limitations placed on Panahi’s creativity would inspire so much creativity in the long run. I’m curious where he will go from here, and how much more he will try to push against the constraints placed on him to explore the many ways to make a film without “making a film.”
Reading
Some people suffer from the misconception that Isao Takahata and I are both some sort of environmentalists, and that we will make a film out of anything as long as it has an environmental theme or message. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such a film would be like a fat dried-up log, propped upright. What we need is a living thing, with strong roots, a solid trunk and branches, so that we can be creative in the way we hang the ornaments.
—Hayao Miyazaki on the beautiful and the good
Coming Soon
The Danish Film Institute has received a massive donation to digitize over 400 silent films for streaming.
Despite all my problems with Alex Ross Perry, I’m nevertheless intrigued to see him veer so far off course into punk biopic (??) with Her Smell next month.
Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote now has a trailer and a release date (April10), though I’ll still need to see this movie with my own two eyes, in a theater, to believe that it’s finally actually happening.
I am going to experiment with making this newsletter monthly instead of twice-monthly. Next time, I’ll preview the Cannes Film Festival and revisit my reactions to new releases from Q1 2019.