Last month I was taken aback by an E-mail from a colleague that said, “I thought, as an apparent defender of the Islamic Republic of Iran, that you should read this.” Before I accessed the link—an AP story about a woman stoned to death by court order for appearing in porn movies—I wrote back to say I was insulted by the implication that my regarding Iranians as human beings meant I supported a totalitarian regime. He promptly sent back an apology, but added, “It’s just that sometimes it sounds as if you regard their regime as ‘better’ than ours. Perhaps I’m misreading you.”
I’ve been in Iran only once—last February, to serve on a film-festival jury—and I was treated with a great deal of warmth and hospitality by people I didn’t regard as dictatorial, though my hosts and I were still subject to totalitarian laws. In Iran it’s illegal, for example, for men and women who aren’t married to touch one another in public, even to shake hands. This doesn’t mean they don’t touch one another in private; the parties I attended in people’s homes were pretty relaxed. But it does mean that I can’t tell you everything I saw or heard in Iran without getting friends into trouble—and it means that by saying even that much I’m giving the false impression that I’m lewdly winking about something. One of the big problems with totalitarian societies is that they muck up everyone’s communication. During the single afternoon I spent in East Berlin before the wall came down, the most disturbing aspect of the bars and cafes I visited was how deadly quiet they all were, with voices seldom rising much above whispers.
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This edge qualifies as an ideological inflection once we realize that this movie refuses to let us rationalize the way these women are treated by their society. They are all mixtures of strengths and weaknesses—the film has no villains or heroes—but it’s obvious from the outset that what they have to put up with is intolerable, and Panahi refuses to allow us to say at any point, for any reason, that any of them is “getting what she deserves.” As with Kiarostami, the narrative gaps constitute a form of respect for the viewer, but here the respect is not merely for the audience’s imagination but also for its sense of decency and ethics. It’s a sensitivity we in the audience share with Panahi—something we can call “ours” collectively, not “ours” as distinct from “that Iranian’s.”
The point at which The Circle really kicks in for me is when a teenage character named Nargess keeps trying and failing to board a bus that would take her back to her hometown. We know she wants desperately to go, but something keeps preventing her. Panahi and Nargess Mamizadeh, the wonderfully expressive and spontaneous nonprofessional playing the part, create a virtual symphony out of all the things we do and don’t know about her, which adroitly dovetail with all the things she does and doesn’t know and with the schedules of various buses. Like the wedding party that keeps comically reentering the movie, her character is both consistent and unpredictable, and her disorientation as she wanders about the bus terminal soon becomes ours. She has a large bruise under her right eye, though we never learn its cause. She’s convinced that a reproduction of a van Gogh landscape she sees on the street depicts her hometown—she believes the painter simply forgot to include certain details. Her older pal Arezou (Maryam Parvin Almani), whose name means “hope,” may have turned a trick to raise money for the bus fare, though that’s never confirmed; we aren’t told why Arezou eventually decides not to go with her either. We gradually discover that Nargess’s failure to board a bus is a phobic reaction, the source of which may be suggested very late in the picture when we see another woman get into a paddy wagon.
The movie begins and ends with two virtuoso long takes—both 360-degree pans defining the poetic and metaphoric limits of Panahi’s universe (for better and for worse), so overloaded they seriously threaten to explode the film’s structure. In the first, a baby is being born offscreen in a hospital, its mother howling with pain; when a nurse reports through a window in a door that it’s a girl, the grandmother is clearly upset—”But the ultrasound said it would be a boy!”—and continues to worry about repercussions from the in-laws as she goes downstairs and speaks to another daughter. As the second daughter leaves the hospital she passes three women at a phone booth—all former prisoners who quickly take over the narrative. In the last (and more problematic) shot a prostitute enters a jail cell where virtually all of the major characters in the film are revealed during one long circular pan. A nearby phone rings, and a guard appears at a window in the cell door asking for a woman who, it turns out, is apparently in an adjacent cell—and her name belongs to the mother who gave birth in the opening shot.
This was part of the argument made last March by two women’s studies professors, Roksana Bahramitash and Homa Hoodfar, in the Montreal Gazette. They say The Circle “creates three distinct kinds of problems for those of us intent on familiarizing people with the realities of women’s situation in the Muslim world. First, it ignores completely the multiplicity of women’s acts of resistance to and subversion of oppressive practices. Second, it presents the story of Iranian women as one of continuous defeat. As a result, they seem in dire need of a white knight to ride in from the West, much as the Crusaders did, to rescue them. Third, it compromises Muslim women’s position and poisons the atmosphere among family, friends and community. When one of our teenage daughters saw the movie, she whispered: ‘I will never go back to Iran’ because of her shame about being Iranian.”
Directed by Jafar Panahi
Written by Kambozia Partovi and Panahi
With Maryam Parvin Almani, Nargess Mamizadeh, Fatemeh Naghavi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaei, and Mojhan Faramarzi.
