My Five Year Plan

Offside

There’s usually a moment in a Jafar Panahi film when Panahi’s meticulously deaestheticized camerawork, rigorously handheld in a manner befitting of his socially-minded neorealist mode of discourse (the Dardennes come to mind as contemporaries in this regard), lapses. It can be something simple - in The Circle it’s simply a shot positioned on a tripod that slowly winds its way a complete 360 degrees around a jail cell. But it always signals a moment of transcendence, in which themes tie together and the anonymous micronarratives fuse into a profound discourse on the nature of post-Revolutionary Iranian society. His novel approach to detailingsocial crises writ large, entirely in keeping with Iranian film aesthetics as well as its Italian neorealist influences, is less magical than Bahman Ghobadi’s, less trancelike than Abbas Kiarostami’s, and less psychoanalytic than Dariush Mehrjui’s. It’s structured, controlled, almost doggedly uninflected. It’s pure cinema.

The Circle

That Panahi has made five features in the last twelve years, every single one of which is not only a major work but either a masterpiece or near-masterpiece, would place him at the forefront of world cinema (a decade after the popular vanguard era of Iranian cinema, since ceded to Hungary, Korea, Thailand, and now Romania, its filmmakers are as - if not more - direly essential now as they ever were). That his work has often been overshadowed in international reception by Kiarostami, Ghobadi, and the Makhmalbafs, owes to his classical sensibility that nearly singlehandedly preserves the sort of earnest social neorealist dramatoc tradition of De Sica and Satyajit Ray.

Offside

Offside is his latest, and one of his lightest, works, but it’s no less important than his seering social dramas. Following an anonymous soccer fan (Sima Mobarak-Shahi), as she tries to sneak into a national soccer game against Bahrain, the film begins in tight close-ups, long hand-held tracking shots, and cutaways to security and to the glances of anonymous passersby. Fusing documentary and fiction, the film’s you-are-there aesthetic resists easy judgements by forcing us to come to grips with our ostensible hero’s failings - she whines, is too easy to give away the ruse, and fails to even remotely convey a sense of masculinity. Soon she is caught (this is less than ten minutes into the film) and taken to a holding pen, and this is where the film truly begins. Panahi uses the pen - and the goofy-relaxed relationship between the uptight guards and the female soccer fans - to produce an earnest Platonic dialogue on Iranian society. A host of ‘types’ - the childish girl, the herdsman-soldier, the Tehranian protofeminist - emerge, but each is granted a dignified dimensionality that’s usually lacking in this sort of problem film (cf. Crash, Babel). When the voice of hard-line conservativism rears its ugly head, as it does twice, the girls and the soldiers, conscripts all of them, seem united in their desire to find a new way.

Soccer is a backdrop to larger issues, yes, but it remains a critical one throughout the film. Filming in and around the actual World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, the game itself, its details and idiosyncracies, dictate and guide much of the action. That the outcome of the game was unknown at the beginning of filming makes the film miraculous - though it retains a fresh, improvisatory feel, its decisive structure, which with its clear halves and small coda seem to mirror a soccer match, seems too inspired to have been spun on the fly

It is in this coda - filled with unearthly lighting (rarely does the film betray its DV origins) - that Panahi seems to bring the themes of the film together. Much of the film seems to concern the nature of viewership in Iran - the ability of men to view the soccer match without any sort of mediation as well as the ability of men to view women, as when an older man searching for his daughter scorns one of the girls for taking off her tchador. As the film counts down to its final moments, there’s an almost ecstatic sense of change, the possibility of a new Iranian revolution - this one social rather than political - taking hold of a young generation. Light - the illuminated, collected faces of the young Iranian protagonists - serves as a sort of beacon of expectation, a lighthouse casting a glance at a hopeful future.