an observer of his own secret art
by
Douglas Messerli
Jafar
Panahi and Nader Saeivar (screenplay), Jafar Panahi (director) سه رخ (Se rokh) (3 Faces) / 2018
You
might describe the great Iranian film director Jafar Panahi as a kind of master
of deception. Despite his 20-year ban from making films, he has managed to
produce a number of cinematic works that subtly transform his personal
activities into films that while, dodging the issue of making a true motion picture,
still ask all viewers the important question of just how and what a movie
means.
In one work, This Is Not a Film, Panahi
stayed entirely within the confines of his apartment and the building in which
it exists, using the camera and even his cell-phone to document his
interchanges with family members, his lawyer, and even a delivery boy, not to forget his large pet
iguana. In another, the director hires himself out as a taxi driver, Jafar
Panahi’s Taxi, (it’s important to quote the full title, since he debunks
the notion of Panahi as a filmmaker, centering his role instead on his
taxi-driver existence) who picks up famous and not-so-famous riders whose various
conversations determine the structure and themes of the film.
Compared with these early works, his 2018
work, 3 Faces, seems absolutely expansive in its range of territory.
Like his previous films the characters in this piece are precisely who they
claim to be: Behnaz Jafari is a famous TV actress, Panahi is a noted director,
and the young woman they are seeking, Marziveh Rezaei, is a would-be actress
who has been accepted by a noted Teheran acting school, but whose family—particularly
her brutish, misogynistic brother and the husband and his family, who we never
see—are violently opposed to her desired career, refusing to allow her to leave
their isolated village on the side of a mountain in rural northwestern Iran,
where the natives mostly speak Azeri-Turkish.
What brings Jafari and Panahi to this
isolated region is a cell-phone message, sent originally by the young girl to
Panahi, but directed to the famous Jafari. In the filmed message, the girl is
seen apparently on the verge of committing suicide because of the family
restrictions and the fact that although Marziveh has tried several times to
reach the actress, she has received no answer and no reprieve from her
desperate situation.
In the last few frames of this message
the girl seemingly hooks a noose to a large wooden outcrop within a hidden
cave, and leaps to her death.
After watching the cellphone message
which Panahi has shown her, the overwrought Jafari jumps into his car, demanding
that they travel to the region bordering Azerbaijan, abandoning without
notification the important final scene of her series.
Jafari insists that she has never
received a message from the girl and, although admitting that she often changes
phone numbers which she passes on to friends, insists that if any of her
acquaintances received such a message they would have notified her. She also
suspects that the film may be a fraud, and that Panahi himself may further be involved
since we once suggested she play a character in a film about a suicide. In
short, the director has already created a sense of drama and suspicion which is
at the heart of any good film.
Moreover,
when they finally arrive in the area, driving on dirt roads that narrowly wind
through the region—at one point encountering a native who demands a series of honks
from the car, evidently a way in which those also on the road know you are
approaching and whether or not your travel upon the road is or is not
urgent—they reach their destination where, after visiting with the mother and
her nearly insane son (the mother is forced to lock him away in his room in
order to attend to her guests); meet with Marziveh’s close friend; and, we soon
find out, collaborator; and investigate the supposed location of the girl’s
death they discover the girl is safe and in good health, hidden away in a house
that lies a ways outside the village.
Jafari is furious with the girl, striking
her again and again for her lies and forcing her travel the long way while putting
her own career in danger. But as the two outsiders attempt to turn back to
Teheran they are met with yet another impediment, a large bull who is dying in
the center of the road whose owner refuses to kill him because of his long-time
service as a stud-bull, impregnating hundreds of heifers, a new batch of which
will arrive at the local market the very next day.
Frustrated by these several issues,
Panahi, playing a very patient but somewhat stand-offish figure—for example, he
watches the fight between the girl and the actress without intruding, and later
refuses to be drawn into Marziveh’s plight—turns the car around with Jafari’s
insistence that they must return to help the girl in her situation.
Despite
Panahi’s rather straight-faced non-involvement in the shooting of somewhat
comedic “movie,” we nonetheless realize that a cameraman (Amin Jafar) is hiding
somewhere just outside of the frame and the supposedly “reality-based” documentary
has, indeed, begun with a kind of fiction. If this is not a film, we can only
ask, what is it?
In fact, 3 Faces is kind of
cinematic decoy where the two central figures experience a sometimes dramatic
and often inexplicable on-the-road encounters not only with the would-be
actress, her family, and friend, but a head-on collision with another culture,
where a woman sleeps in her own grave and a man asks Jafari to take back his
recently circumscribed son’s skin to bury it in a place that will bring him a
good education and career.
If nearly all the villagers are
acquainted through their cell-phones and TV satellites with Jafari and know of
Panahi’s forbidden films, they hilariously think that the two have been sent to
them by the government to help them to obtain what they desperately need: a new
road, a doctor, better cell-phone reception, etc.
Time and again the two visitors are
invited to stop, chat, and share tea and other local delicacies; yet Jafari and
Panahi, in a hurry to settle the matter with Marziveh, shoulder on with the
director sleeping the night in his car while Jafari bravely walks back into the
village to call her studio director and plan a second visit of the girl’s
family when her father, evidently far more moderate than Marziveh’s brother,
has returned in the morning.
By the time Jafari reenters the girl’s
home the next morning—with Panahi once again disavowing any role in the
transaction (“women are better at this,” in offhandedly observes)—they have
both learned of the fates the woman of this region face if they do not go along
with the self-proclaimed laws dictated to them by the village patriarchs.
Marziveh’s friend recounts a time when, frustrated
with the narrowness of the road, she attempted with shovel in hand to extend
the road a little to enable a small turn-around, male village leaders insisted
it was not work for a woman to do. The home in which Marziveh is hiding belongs
to an actress, poet, and dancer Shahrzad, once famous for her appearances in
Iranian cinema, who was shunned by the villagers upon her return and pointed to
as an example of how women ended up after such a career. Marziveh’s mother is
terrified that if the men discover that her daughter has stayed in the house,
the men will burn it down. Shahrzad, as some critics have observed, might
almost be seen as a 4th face, except we never see her except from a
very far distance.
Panahi’s passivity might be explained
simply as a ruse to appease the Iranian censors, suggesting it is not he who is
controlling any of these events, but the others who have created the drama. As
in his taxi driver role, he is here just a driver taking Jafari to where, sometimes
contradictorily, she desires to go.
Yet, finally, when Marziveh’s brother,
locked outside of his house, grabs a brick from a nearby wall, directly
threatening the director sitting quietly in the automobile. Even here, however,
Panahi remains in a passive role, rolling up his window and exiting the car to
move a distance away.
In a brilliant cut to the final long
scene we see the damage on the car’s front window that that brick has rendered.
The car is moving back toward Teheran with both the director and actress in the
front seats. At the place where they must honk for safety’s sake they are told
by three long honks that something more important than their flight is on its
way.
At that moment Jafari, leaving the car,
insists she needs a walk, and heads down the dirt road for a long distance
before, from the back seat, the young student actress calls out and runs toward
her, the first time we perceive that Jafari has obviously been able to negotiate
the girl’s freedom.
The arriving vehicles of trucks are the
promised bellowing heifers, obviously on their way to encounter a new stud
bull—or you never know in this strange place, perhaps the resuscitated earlier
bull. Panahi must wait a bit longer as the girl, desperate to become the next
generation’s famous actress and her famous savior walk forward into the
distance and out of sight.
The would-be director has lost his film’s
heroes to the acts of their own volition. He is but a delivery man, who in the
capitol city will later drop them off for the activities that will continue to
define their lives. For Panahi, we recognize, such a role has been stolen,
leaving him as a mere observer of his own secret art.
At the Cannes Film Festival, this
observer received the award with co-writer Nadar Saeivar for Best Screenplay.
Los
Angeles, July 28, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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