MovieMartyr.com - The Mirror / The Circle

Though he’s clearly no Makhamlbaf or Kiarostami, director Jafar Panahi’s work appears to be some of Iran’s most ambitious. His two most recent films to receive American distribution, The Mirror and The Circle show that, despite his ambition, he is not the most consistently successful of the country’s auteurs. The Mirror, which is the tries for more and succeeds at less than The Circle, is the earlier of the two films. It follows a young Iranian girl as she attempts to get home alone from school after her mother fails to pick her up at the end of the day. The film is the same sort of narratively minimalist, child-focused tale as the Iranian films Children of Heaven or Panahi’s debut The White Balloon, and for the first half of the picture, the focus seems to be on showing us the country and its people from a naïve perspective. This is relatively effective, but not for a moment does the presence of a child guide make it feel like anything less than a political film. This is especially compounded by the presence of characters such as an elderly woman on a bus who complains about the treatment of elders in the nation, and the repeated times the film raises the issue of sexual segregation.

After about forty minutes of this, the film does something radical. Mina, the young actress that has been playing the little girl suddenly removes the cast that has adorned her arm as well as her sari, and says that she doesn’t “want to act any more.” A boom mike swings into the picture as the film’s faked reality shatters. Suddenly, she begins sulking and says she wants to return home to attend a birthday party. Panahi seems to be suggesting that even though the film seems to be no longer fictional, the facts haven’t changed much. Unfortunately, this ploy’s execution doesn’t live up to the brilliance of its initially jarring unveiling. At the moment when the fourth wall breaks, the film stock changes to one that hasn’t been color corrected. After a long, singular shot in with this more realistic feeling stock, however, the film returns to its original look. A handheld camera replaces the more formalistic compositions of the first half as the crew scrambles after Mira (who is still wearing a microphone), but the shift in color dulls the feeling that reality is being presented. The charade becomes somewhat useless because of this, and much of the film’s second half feels more like a repetition of the first instead of the validation of it that it wants to be.

Panahi’s The Circle is not as fundamentally flawed as The Mirror, but that might because it never attempts such astounding narrative leaps. The film, like Richard Linklater’s Slacker, shows a series of stories that flow into each other as the characters in them pass by each other. The theme here examines the limited rights that Iranian women have, and thankfully Panahi doesn’t filter his message through a child’s perspective this time. The circle that the title refers to is the loop that casts imprisoned women in that country in an incessant battle with the law. After being released from jail, it is only a matter of time before they end up in prison again, since they are not permitted to travel or seek employment without a man’s permission. What’s more galling is that their crimes are as petty as smoking in public.

The director’s style is consistent with his theme. He uses tracking shots to physically connect his characters to one another and circular pans to visually illustrate his thesis. The film’s main problem lies within that thesis itself. Since it only explores a small segment of the female Iranian population, its attempts to define the entire nation’s female experience in the country feel too comprehensive for their own good. The film seems to shoehorn its characters stories into its metaphor instead of making their plight seem to naturally flow into one. In both cases, if Panahi was not so obsessed with being all-encompassing in his storytelling, he might be a much better filmmaker. Still, both of these films are prime examples noble filmic failures. It’s almost always far better to see a director stumble when attempting to show a political plight or trying to reinvent the form than when making a facile, sentimental work, and it’s representative of the country’s strong cinema that an innovator like Panahi does not quite embody the cutting edge of Iranian cinema.

The Mirror ***

The Circle ***1/2

12/02/01

Jeremy Heilman