Burden to Bear
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s fifth ‘jailhouse’ film might be his best yet, and a master class in artistic obstinacy.
No Bears
Director: Jafar Panahi • Writer: Jafar Panahi
Starring: Jafar Panahi, Vahid Mobaseri, Naser Hashemi, Bakhtiar Panjei, Mina Kavani, Narjes Delaram, Reza Heydari, Yousef Soleymani, Amir Davar, Darya Alei
Iran • 1hr 47mins
Opens Hong Kong April 13 • IIA
Grade: A-
Just because No Bears premiered at Venice in competition last year it doesn’t mean director Jafar Panahi has won any friends or influenced any people. Like many, many, many filmmakers these days, Panahi had been thrown in prison – for six years – for… some sort of bullshit charge. He’s a veteran of the arrest game now, in and out of jail (currently out and under review after a shit ton of noise by filmmakers around the world) and arrested multiple times since 2010 for collusion, propaganda and threatening national security. He’s been slapped with a 20-year filmmaking ban and almost all international travel.
And yet here he is, with one of his most sneaky (in the best way) films yet, a fully realised, bristling allegory he somehow managed to make on the down-low. Probably in between prison bids. No Bears falls back into Panahi’s favourite quagmire, the nature of cinema and truth, taking with it two parallel love stories that comment on the cost of making art in a repressive space, something he clearly has no intention of stopping but which he clearly understands has risks. During his 20-year ban, Panahi has made five features, including This Is Not a Film and Taxi (and a relatively buoyant a segment in ’rona anthology The Year of the Everlasting Storm), but none has been quite as self-interrogating as No Bears, and none has been as righteously and conflictedly indignant. This is objectively great filmmaking; something that lands on that sweet spot between entertainment and clarion call.
What price art?
There are no bears in the tiny Iranian village on the Turkish border that director Panahi (Panahi playing himself) has decamped to. The bear thing is a superstition, a bogeyman, that keeps the people under control. Just the thought of the wild animals keeps everyone on their best behaviour. Pahahi is shooting a new film on the sly, of course, in Turkey. His AD Reza (Reza Heydari) does the physical work across the border while Panahi Skype’s-in with comments. The film he’s making is about a couple, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei) and Zara (Mina Kavani), plotting an escape from Iran, and the murky waters of conmen, fake passports and pricey EU residency they’re wading into. On top of which the film is based on Bakhtiar and Zara’s actual lives. When he’s not directing, Panahi wanders around the village he’s staying in, chatting with his hosts, Ghanbar (Vahid Mobaseri) and his mother (Narjes Delaram) and generally coming off as a Tehran elite to the locals. After taking photos of some local kids one day, he’s approached by the Village Chief (Naser Hashemi), who claims one of his pictures captured proof of young lovers Solduz (Amir Davar) and Gozal (Darya Alei) being shady. Seems Gozal’s family promised her to another man and the other guy is pissed. He wants his bride, and he wants Panahi’s photo to demand what he considers justice. Panahi, meanwhile, says he has no such photo and coughs up his camera’s memory card – which means nothing to these people – and condescendingly takes a holy vow that he’s telling the truth. It’s an old tradition in the village. Things get even more twisted when Solduz shows up, pleading with Panahi to cover for him and Gozal, just for a few days, because they’re going to elope.
That’s the very beginning of a rich, incredibly engrossing story that’s best experienced blind. The two tracks these opposing love stories seem to be on are, in actuality, not that different. In both cases, the couples are looking for escape, a recurring theme in No Bears – from Iran, from authoritarian rule, from superstition, tradition, and quite possibly from oneself. The Matryoshka doll nature of the narrative reveals Panahi’s ideas slowly and deliberately, and becomes denser and denser with each passing minute and with each reflexive address to the camera. Knowing the reality the indomitable Panahi is facing adds yet another layer to the narrative. And really, is No Bears a narrative? Is it a documentary? A massive middle finger to Tehran? Self-recriminating confession? Constantly hovering over the film is the idea that Panahi’s convictions are going to get him or someone else arrested or worse. He knows he’s on dangerous ground judging by the way he recoils from the invisible Iran-Turkey border he visits with Reza, and the question becomes one of whether or not his art is worth the risk (it is). No Bears winds and weaves, meandering around the village and lazily getting to its points about fear, power, freedom and the movies’ part in all of it. At first blush it feels bloated, but on reflection it’s obviously so meticulously layered and so aggressively blurs the line between fact and fiction you don’t realise what you’ve seen until the last, gobsmacking frame when Panahi realises it too. — DEK