October 14, 2022 12:18 pm
A masterpiece has arrived in the room which owes its fame to the arrest of its author, the Iranian Jafar Panahi. But it would still be a masterpiece even if nothing had happened to Panahi and Venice in fact, as we have written, would have deserved more of the Special Jury Prize.
Bears don’t exist it is a delicate and light film, magical and of poetry, very enjoyable to watch, elements that deliberately take precedence over the questions posed, profound, of the utmost gravity and at the same time of the utmost humanity. And the best expression is Panahi himself, who, as in all the latest films, appears on video, putting forward, in a simple and sober way, his placid humanity, his quiet good-naturedness in the face of every problem and adversity. The physical body of those who make cinema once again makes the film here.
After being placed under house arrest for a long time – at least a couple of his films focus on this – then freed and now imprisoned again, the Iranian director makes almost an omen. A framed film, obsessively framed, but which desperately tries to escape framing. Reality reaches the protagonist, like a shadow that stretches, inexorable.
A prison of the mind
A shadow that reaches us too, because it is a film that, although set in a minimal reality, the rural one of a village on the border with Turkey, also speaks of our societies reduced to a minimum thought, to a single thought and based not only on fear , but on the fear of what does not exist or almost. It speaks to us of a reality that is becoming a prison of the mind, which gradually becomes inextricable from the physical one, and that the manipulative powers push us to build ourselves, at least in part. And finally it speaks to us of a reality that is becoming more and more unknowable. In fact, the main question posed to us all by Panahi’s new feature film is perhaps the following: which reality?
Behind its sometimes a bit crib aesthetic, Panahi’s film is actually a very modern, rational, enlightened work
The time when Panahi won the Golden Lion in Venice with The circle (2000), a clearly circular film on the situation of Iran, a theocratic state in which, however, there is a vote, but which cannot quite get out of its circle – intended as a sort of no-place or limbo where one turns eternally in circles – not only for the undoubted, important limits of the system but also because the conservatives, now back in power (perhaps thanks to Trump), to maintain the status quo of the circular swamp work extensively on fear, especially in rural environments and more generally among the poor classes.
In this sense, behind its sometimes a bit crib aesthetic (it may seem a paradox in an Islamic country but basically it is not: Panahi aims at a universal cinema), Panahi’s film is actually a very modern, rational, enlightened.
A film that seeks the faint light of rationality in the night of irrationality while knowing how to evoke the lost magic of a night of the Magi, guided by the light of a star towards the savior, but symbols of cosmopolitanism, however archaic. And the night here is in fact magical, almost fairy. Serene and yet disturbing: in the darkness Bethlehem, in its various modern variations, small and large, that peek out, seems a chimera, a mirage of the night. In this respect, the film rediscovers enchanting shades worthy of Kiarostami, already evident in the previous feature film by Panahi, the magnificent Three faces (2018), where, however, there was talk of cinema and deception, as well as in The mirror (1997).
On the threshold
The director left Tehran to settle in a mountain village on the border with Turkey to be as close as possible to the crew and cast of a film set in a Turkish town on the border with Iran and which for this reason is virtually directing. , talking to them through his computer.
Always on the threshold. On the threshold not only between concrete and virtual reality but on a reality continuously (re) staged by everyone and everything: from the villagers who prefer that the lie become reality even in the form of official truth (the oath required of the director which in turn proposes to film everything), as well as by the same actors whose human condition of constant fiction in life now irreparably affects their dignity.
And which is more true or acted out than the two parallel love stories that unfold here? The alleged fiction of the film shot by Panahi or that of the village with an equally presumed authenticity? But we are well beyond the old question of where the demarcation of the true from the false lies. Because everything is held on an extremely unstable threshold, constantly. As for Panahi himself who, lost in the night, physically finds himself on the border line between Iran and Turkey, the threshold from which he leaps back, terrified. And as for all of us, when the fear of everything now clouds rational thought, resorting to schematisms between dark and light to make us regret the cold war.
Tangle of formulas
“The people of the city have problems with the authorities, we have problems with superstition,” the man from the village hosting the director says in a splendid nocturnal sequence. A man who seems perfectly aware of the tangle of formulas and ritual situations now devoid of meaning and real conviction even for those who put them forward, and which therefore seem to be recited in community life by force of inertia, because it is a common opinion of convenience. the factual impossibility of getting out of the circle, or even just of conceiving it.
Consequently, those who should be true and tell the truth act as they like or to confirm their own little false certainties. Those who should recite to tell alleged truths prefer to stop and say them head-on because he is facing the last wall. And who finally should direct this play tries to stay true to himself, but maybe he is just blind. Perhaps actually “there is no light at the end of this tunnel”.
For cinema itself, the main art of reality, we are at the ultimate threshold, or rather almost at surrender or, inversely, at the ultimate resistance. Neorealism – the film school of Abbas Kiarostami, master of Panahi – seems to be impossible because it is almost deprived of meaning and on this point we let the viewer reflect on the ineffable ending. The film, understood here as the whole of cinema, takes the drift on his behalf. Or is it reality that becomes too disruptive, the desire for a reality that finally expresses a truth worth living, a desire that is not by chance expressed by a female character? And will this drift of cinema-reality be such to the point of stopping? And the arrest, which is confused in reality with that of the director, will be the bearer of a new beginning?
As we wrote at the beginning, it is a framed film. Not only from the room but from reality itself that has taken on mental forms which, once settled, make it more and more square: if the viewer is attentive, he will notice that Panahi, albeit naturally, abounds in shots in which the outside appears framed by computer screens. , windows, doors and so on, until all these levels become confused with each other, taking the form of a sort of assemblage of linked tales and the appearance of pleasant and ancient parables. As well as, at times, that of a science fiction narrative made up of multiple parallel realities, from which the viewer can go out and re-enter to discover new things at will, and of marches on the dark side of the Moon surrounded by the most enveloping cosmic darkness, in which the viewer, even here, will be able to stop to contemplate equally new points and angles. Perhaps the best way to reflect and rediscover the (common) sense of things.