CIRCLE, THE (Dayereh) (director/editor/writer: Jafar Panahi; screenwriter: Kambozia Partovi, based on a story by Mr. Panahi; cinematographer: Bahram Badakhshani; cast: Maryam Parvin Almani (Arezou), Nargess Mamizadeh (Nargess), Fatemeh Naghavi (The Mother), Fereshteh Sadr Orafai (Pari), Mojgan Faramarzi (Mojgan, Prostitute), Elham Saboktakin (Elham); Runtime: 90; Winstar Cinema; 2000)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
How do you escape from totalitarian Iran if you are a woman prisoner and have just escaped from jail or have a temporary pass from jail? The film's theme is about how women are made to suffer in Iran because of its harsh Islamic laws against them, which makes all of their lives placed in the same never ending circle of repression. Which is why the film has no main protagonist; the cast, except for Fereshteh Sadr Orafai and Fatemeh Naghavi, are all nonprofessionals. Jafar Panahi (White Balloon/The Mirror), a disciple of Abbas Kiarostami, has created a devastatingly restrained powerhouse of a political film. A winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, even though it has been banned in Iran except for a one-time screening to a small student audience. It got an international release, and has been well-received in all the countries it has so far played in.
It is a gut-wrenching, neorealism film, filled with an ominous tenseness that begins with the opening dark scene at a hospital maternity ward when a grandmother is told that her daughter's child is not a boy but a girl and she reacts with horror, saying that her daughter's in-laws will never accept the child and will seek a divorce. She wonders how the ultrasound could be wrong in saying the expectant child was to be a boy!
A woman's life is shown to be not as worthy as a man's in modern Iran, as the story of one woman is carried on as the story of another woman's. So we never follow one protagonist, but a myriad of disenfranchised women; and, we are never sure what they are up to or where they are going, but they are all troubled because they are unescorted and have no man in their life.
Outside the hospital we leave the ruffled granny and follow three edgy women clad in chadors, who just came out of prison on temporary passes and plan not to return; they are on the street phone trying to get money for transportation to some place far from Tehran. When one tries selling a gold chain to a man who tries to steal it from her, she's taken into custody by the police while the man is released. The other two flee the area immediately; they are very nervous types who keep changing their plans leaving us unsure of where they are going and what they are up to: Nargess (Mamizadeh), an 18-year-old with an unexplained purplish bruise under her eye, who is capitivated by an imitation of a van Gogh picture she sees on the busy street. She thinks it's a picture of her country neighborhood, but that the artist forgot to put flowers in certain spots. The older woman, the pock-faced and always gazing hawk-like Arezou (Almani), might have secured the money by turning a trick. But when it comes time to get on the bus, she for some reason can't and sends the reluctant teenager on alone to her hometown. Nargess can't purchase a bus ticket because she's a woman without an ID card and without an escort, but she talks the reluctant ticket seller into believing she's a student who left her ID card home. But for some unexplained reason she goes to a buy a man's shirt and misses the bus to her paradise location. This comes after she tries unsuccessfully to contact a pregnant woman, Pari (Orafai), who escaped from jail but is kicked out of her parent's house because they are disgraced by her being unmarried and pregnant. She escaped from prison to get an illegal abortion, as Iran doesn't allow for abortions without the approval of the husband. Her pregnancy is explained as occurring when her husband was executed 4 months ago and she was allowed one last visit.
We follow Pari as she makes contact with her ex-prison friend, who now works as a ticket seller in a movie theater and who accepts that her husband took another wife while she was in prison by proudly saying she's still the Number 1 wife. From her she finds out the address of her other ex-prison friend, Elham (Saboktakin), who works as a nurse in a hospital. She hopes through her contacts that she'll secure an abortion for her. But her friend refuses to help, telling her she married a Pakistani doctor and he knows nothing of her past. She does not want to ruin her current marriage by disclosing anything else about herself, but this news is crushing to Pari who has nowhere else to turn to. On the street she feels pity for a girl who is being abandoned by her mother (Naghavi), but when she talks with the mother she sees how torn she is about what she's doing and only tries to talk her into getting her child back. Everything about this Iranian regime smacks of an unfeeling attitude towards women, leaving them with little hope. The only hope is shown by a wedding party, as the filmmaker comically cuts into different scenes of them throughout the film; the wedding for the woman, at least, starts out as a joyous experience.
The most powerful scene in the film is the arrest of a young prostitute, Mojgan (Faramarzi), who is wearing makeup and got into the car of a male. Her arrest comes at the same time as the mother who abandoned her child gets into the car of an unmarked police car and is arrested, but who escapes when the police get involved with the arrest of the prostitute. When the prostitute is put into the paddy wagon and carted off to jail, she tries to smoke a cigarette. But the police guards tell her there is no smoking, this is a running gag throughout the film, as women are not allowed to smoke in public but are always trying to sneak in a smoke. When the male prisoner offers the guards a free cigarette he's allowed to smoke, which encourages the prostitute to freely puff away and she feels a release of frustration as the smoke comes rapidly out of her mouth. It is these small acts of rebellion that give these women some hope, and what they share with the audience is a camaraderie against their repressors. The enemy obviously isn't the Iranian people, but an intolerant government that cannot bend and forces its stupid rules down a subjected peoples' throats. This film conveys these dark feelings through a story without much of a plot or dialogue, yet brilliantly establishes the yearnings for freedom that these women have. It's much like those Warner Brother films of the 1930s with Jimmy Cagney thumbing his nose at the high brows. Panafi has taken us into the psyche of the oppressive regime and without saying what's right or wrong, allows us instead to see for ourselves the everyday street life of modern Iran. It's a country far from freedom, yet its filmmakers can still make a film that is unpredictable and forthright. This is something that's rarely accomplished in uncensored Hollywood whose commercial ventures are mostly formulaic crowd pleaser films.
The women featured in this tale remain mysterious to us: we are never told what crimes they are charged with. All we see are the repressions they are faced with: no smoking in public, no abortions, they can't enter certain places without a chador wrapped around them, they can't get hotel accomodations without IDs, take rides when alone with men, and they can't even buy a bus ticket when alone. These are amazing restrictions placed on them and ones that Panafi allows us to see in an exciting and unforgettable way. It's a moody, realistic tale about Iran that the news media can't seem to cover with a reasonable verisimilitude as well as this very daring effort does. It succeeds in showing us as much as one can in today's Iran about its long laundry list of injustices. There's little room to see The Circle as anything but a way all Iranian women are kept as prisoners and how their stories of repression continue on from one woman to another. When we lose sight of one woman, the next woman's story could be just as horrendous. This is one film that cannot easily be forgotten, even as we lose sight of the different women we have seen. All the performances were natural and easily fit into the story. The facial expressions of both Orfani and Mamizade caught my attention: Orfani's had that caring, intense look of the Italian actress Anna Magnani; while Mamizade's expression changed from curiosity to vulnerability. She seemed to have a radiance that lit up the screen and best caught the desperation of their situation.
REVIEWED ON 7/1/2001 GRADE: A+
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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