Jafar Panahi's The Mirror

This afternoon, Marta and I watched Jafar Panahi's movie The Mirror via the Criterion Channel on our television.

Panahi's movie tells the story of a first grade girl named Mina after she finishes school and wants to go home. Mina's mother does not show up at the school, so Mina decides to find her way home on her own. Just crossing the street is an ordeal because Tehran's traffic is thick. I, personally, was reminded of my year in Beirut and a couple of trips I took to Damascus, Syria. Crossing the street in those cities was not that difficult, but there were far fewer traffic signals than I have found in any American city. Plus the cars are older and louder and drivers are more than willing to use the horn to express their emotions. By contrast, American drivers almost never use the horn.

Mina eventually finds her way to a bus and tries to navigate her way home. Mina ends up getting off at the wrong stop, gets on the bus going the other direction and tries again. This attempt to find the way home continues like this until about the halfway point of the movie.

It is at this point that the fourth wall is broken as Mina takes off her costume, says she does not want to act any more and walks off the bus and starts changing her shoes. We realize that everyone on the bus was either an actor or a member of the crew. The movie continues following Mina on her quest to find her way home from a distance. It is never clear if the crew continues following in the bus or switches vehicles. Mina is wearing a remote microphone that occasionally stops transmitting leading to a few isolated moments of silence in the movie.

The idea of breaking the fourth wall of the narrative and calling attention to the fact that one is creating a story is not new. In fact, there is even one instance of a blind man singing a song about Odysseus at one point in the Odyssey, with Homer placing himself as a character in the poem as a character singing the story. My personal favorite use of this device occurred in The Muppet Movie where Kermit and company are stranded in the desert. When they have given up hope, a vehicle with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem comes to rescue our heroes. When Kermit asks Dr. Teeth how he knew where to find them, Dr. Teeth says that Kermit left a copy of the script behind and he just read ahead. And while we are on the topic of the fourth wall, my vote for the most extreme use of this technique is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. The Criterion Channel describes the movie as follows:

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York's Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they're making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.

Back to Panahi's The Mirror. 

Josh and Bennie Safdie (directors of Uncut Gems) recently did an interview for the Criterion Channel in which they talk about some of their favorite movies, including The Mirror. They note that several Iranian movies use children as a way of commenting on Iranian society without running afoul of the censors. For instance, the movie Where Is the Friend's House? made by Panahi's mentor Abbas Kiarostami is another Iranian movie about a young child trying to find his friend's house in order to return his classmate's notebook. (As an aside, let me say that Richard Brody's appreciation of Kiarostami's work is worth reading.)

One of the things I found worth watching about The Mirror is a chance to see what everyday life in Tehran looks like. There are very few American movies set in Tehran. (Syiana has two short scenes there.) So, just the chance to see more of what one city in Iran looks like and sounds like is something that does not happen very often. Movies do occasionally have the ability to show us a moment of culture that we might otherwise never experience.

In addition to the sights of Tehran, the microphone that Mina wears throughout her journey captures everyday conversations and sounds, giving some insight into what some people in Tehran think. You get to hear a radio broadcast of a soccer game between Iran and Korea (not clear if it is North or South) and people's reactions as the score is updated. At one point in a taxi, we are able to hear a detailed debate between a male taxi driver and one of this female patrons about what proper gender roles should be and if those roles need to be changed for women that work outside the home.

The conversations, the sounds of cars, the streets, and the occasional radio stand out more than they might in another movie because The Mirror contains no scored music. It was only during the final credit sequence that I got a chance to hear some Iranian music. It is rare for me to see a movie without a score.

The Mirror is different, but not that different than other art movies.  Since making The Mirror, Panahi's life has changed radically as has his approach to filmmaking. Richard Brody in the New Yorker opened his review of Panahi's more recent movie Taxi by describing some of these changes:

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi, who is under house arrest and has been banned from filmmaking since 2010 on the grounds of political dissent, starts “Taxi,” his clandestinely produced film, with a long take of the streets of Tehran, seen through the windshield of a car. It’s a shot that exudes love of the long-unseen face of the city and joy in merely being outdoors—and in moviemaking itself. Panahi is driving the car, pretending to be a cab driver, encountering strangers, acquaintances, and even a relative—and filming the encounters with a dashboard-mounted camera that he passes off as a security device.

“Taxi” is Panahi’s third film that he has made since his arrest and sentencing. He has transformed his work to match the radically transformed conditions of his life. Facing monstrous circumstances—a sentence of house arrest along with a twenty-year ban on filmmaking, giving interviews, and travelling outside the country—he responded with a movie of majestic insolence, “This Is Not a Film,” from 2011. He made this film mainly in the confines of his apartment, depicting himself there, facing the terms and implications of his sentence, and acting out the story of the dramatic movie that he’d have made if not banned. He was able to have “This Is Not a Film” seen worldwide by an equally audacious ploy: the film was smuggled out of Tehran in a flash drive embedded in a cake. Panahi followed it up with an intimate, paranoid, hallucinatory thriller, “Closed Curtain,” made in an isolated house, about the lives of Iranians under siege by the regime—including Panahi himself, who walks in on the action.

Now, in “Taxi,” he raises the stakes of his confinement even further, venturing outside his home, albeit in a bubble—the taxi itself—which he turns into a sort of mobile miniature movie studio, where he’s shielded from view and can hold public conversations in private, where he can film under controlled circumstances that enfold the wider and uncontrolled ones of the city at large.

Panahi clearly enjoys making films, no matter how difficult the government of Iran makes it for him to film and distribute them. I am glad I have seen one of this movies and intend to see more in the future.