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| Panahi and friend kill time. |
«««« This Is Not a Film. Neither written nor
directed by Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. Coming Soon.
This
is Not a Film is fittingly described in the credits not as a
film, but as "an effort" by Jafar Panahi. The title sounds clever in a po-mo way, like one of those playful
Magritte paintings of a hat with a caption, "this is not a hat". But
this is serious business.
For Jafar Panahi (The
White Balloon, The Circle) is not
just another punning intellectual, but a persecuted master of Iranian neo-realism.
Based partly on his outspokenness in the wake of the disputed
"re-election" of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and official unease over the
criticism of the regime implicit in his films, Panahi and his entire family
were arrested in 2010. The filmmaker is currently facing a six-year prison
sentence and a twenty-year ban from
making movies, writing scripts, giving interviews, or travelling abroad. His
conviction, fully intended to be a death sentence for his creative life, has
been called a calamity for the arts in Iran.
This Is Not is a documentary of Panahi's
house arrest as he awaited the result of his appeal. Given the charges against
him, just making this film, any film,
was a crime in the eyes of the Iranian regime. And getting it seen abroad was a
heroic act, accomplished by loading the finished product on a thumb drive and
smuggling it out of Iran--no kidding--concealed in a cake. It was screened as a surprise entry at the 2011
Cannes Film Festival.
Panahi hadn't yet begun serving his prison term when he
made this "effort", but he might as well have been. Here we see the
filmmaker trapped in forced idleness, puttering around his Tehran apartment,
eating breakfast, surfing the (censored) web, chatting with his lawyer on the
phone. And when his inspiration gets the better of him, he calls up his friend,
documentarian Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, and asks him to come over and shoot some
footage of him "explaining" the screenplay to his last film--the one
he'll never get to make. "Is shooting me describing a film the same as
making a film?" Panahi wonders. In happier circumstances, questions of the
nature of authorship, of what being a "director" of something really
means, would make for some interesting parlor discussion. Here, of course,
Panahi's feigned non-authorship has very practical implications.
Without a doubt, This
Is Not a Film is excruciating because it's about a guy doing nothing. As
Mirtahmasb shoots Panahi with his professional camera and Panahi shoots him
back with his phone, both seem slightly bemused by their predicament--two grown
men who just want to make movies, reduced to this because of the criminal
insecurity of men in power. And yet the drama implicit here, in the risks they
run just by showing their faces onscreen, resonates as deeply as any of
Panahi's Tehran street stories. Whatever other motives they share, Panahi and
Mirtahmasb love film. They love it in the kind of hopeless, total way that
dares risk imprisonment and torture. It's a love of the art for its own sake
that is inconceivable, not only among both the ayatollahs, but the hacks and
cynics who run Hollywood too.
The political subtext isn't very subtle. As Panahi plays
with his iPhone and chats up the fellow who collects his garbage, we hear the
sounds of explosions outside the apartment. It turns out that there's an
unofficial public holiday underway, "Fireworks Day", that the regime
isn't too pleased about because of its anti-establishment atmosphere. The
explosions are firecrackers--but only for now. As the mullahs crack down on
peaceful irritants like Panahi, they invite the kind of protest that won't be
contained by any court decision.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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