Pardeh

Like the other review on this film's page said, the first half is exquisite. In fact, it changed tones so much that at one point I had to check that I was actually seeing the same film. The performances are fine, no doubt, but there's really something to be said about how the script is structured and ultimately sort of collapses on itself. As seen by my rating here, I don't dislike the film completely. No, it has too much ambition for that, and the first half is fine, but it's extremely disappointing where it goes in its second half and instead just becomes a middling, ho-hum tale that seems to be stalled in no knowing where it really wants to go. What a shame indeed.

Riveting first half. Surrealist, indulgent, narcissistic second half. A lovely "dog-film" (first half).

It is possible that writer/director/actor Kambuzia Partovi contributed more to the first half.

Beautiful actress Maryam Moqadam gives a noteworthy performance.

Panahi has talent. But there is an element of disbelief that exudes from most of his interesting projects. (Dogs on the open beach in daylight at the end of the film, which contradicts earlier statements.)

While the situation Panahi currently is living by, is crazy at least and not worthy of a man of his class (considering his movie about women and soccer/football a few years ago), him trying to make a movie about it (even though he actually isn't allowed to, which in itself does not make any sense) does not entirely succeed. At least that is how I felt about it, but others seem to have found things they liked.

And I hope the rating represents what people feel about the movie and is not just a support for Panahi. I'm pretty sure there are better ways to show that. Although showing this movie at the Berlin Film Festival hopefully did help him rather than brought him into a situation where he might have more to worry about. Whatever the case, the movie starts off with one thing and goes off into another direction. And while the mind can be deceiving like that and it's obviously a metaphor (story-wise and framing wise), this doesn't succeed to pull you in (if you excuse the pun)

I knew from This Is Not A Film that Jafar Panahi is not an ordinary filmmaker. Maybe he was beforehand, but at least now is different. He bends the lines between fiction and documentary in a way I've never seen before, in both artistic and expositional ways. The first 15 minutes of Closed Curtain is some of the most expressionistic filmmaking of the year as co-director Kambuzia Partovi silently closes curtains symbolising the oppressive isolation, physically and mentally, Panahi must feel under house arrest. Unfortunately, the film stumbles in the introduce of drama. There's little believable in the execution of the young criminal couple who disrupt the writer. Then it takes a really interesting turn. The way Panahi manifests the difference between this fictional story and his own pathos is fascinating and crushing. If it didn't have that emotional frustration to it, and recursion that his own writing is being disrupted, then it wouldn't work. Clunkiness in the filmmaking and ambiguity in certain sequences leave it feeling incomplete but Closed Curtain certainly meets This Is Not A Film's match when it comes to unexpected thoughtfulness.

7/10

www.theframeloop.com

Directed alongside fellow Iranian and the criminally underrated filmmaker Kambuzia Partovi, Panahi's latest manifests the same vehemence for the tyrannical Iranian government as in last year's deconstructionist documentary This Is Not A Film. His first full length feature film since 2006′s brilliant Offside, Closed Curtain is a more aggressively political comment on the creative restrictions he has bestowed on him, and his unrelenting perseverance to conquer them.

With the Iranian government banning citizens from owning dogs as domestic pets (harrowingly, a true sanction), an unnamed screen-writer (played expertly here by co-director Partovi) flees to a remote beachside villa with his furry best friend, a beautiful little dog called 'Boy'. In constant fear that he will be caught – with the dog left for dead – the erratic scribe quite literally shuns the outside world, barricading the doors and blacking out the windows. Stuck in their new, isolated sanctuary, the man and dog are paid an unexpected visit by two young Iranians (Maryam Moqadam and Hadi Saeedi). Like our hero, they too are on the run from corrupt state officials.

Forty-five minutes in, the austere, naturalistic situation is dispelled by an indulgent second half with many increasingly odd moments. These include the visionary's quintessential reflexive streams of consciousness moments; a break in the fourth wall with Panahi's jarring on-screen presence; and a discombobulating critique on the very unorthodox nature of filmmaking and hiding from the reality that lies beyond the camera lens. Some of these moments are unnerving in all the right, satirical ways, whereas some of these 'experiments' are so dispiritingly chaotic that one would think they were coming from filmmakers of far younger vintage.

In one particularly seething encounter, a friend of Panahi's suggests to the on-screen director that there is more to life than work; to which the candid director suggests that all other things are 'foreign' to him. After countless censorship cases and one two year long house arrest, it's perhaps unsurprising that Jafar Panahi is so entrenched in – and haunted by – his nefarious creations that he has become removed to the life outside. Stuck on a critical parapet, Closed Curtain takes a panoptic glance at silenced Iranian society, without ever feeling like he is gallantly speaking for it as he has done previously with Crimson Tide and The Circle. The result means that this clunky social commentary feels like it can only resonate in an audience of a similar distance – that of a Scandinavian film festival, perhaps – rather than the homegrown audience he has become the audacious patron of.

Despite an endearing first half, the drama wallows for too long in opaque political allegories and slight-of-hand trickery. Considering the limitations and policing these filmmakers encounter on a daily basis, it seems churlish to quarrel about the film's production values. Even still, it must be noted that Closed Curtain has some of the most horrendous sound recording and mixing I've witnessed in recent memory.

Forgetting these flaws, there is one half of an exceptional, poetic drama hiding behind the curtain here. An alienated chamber piece, Panahi and Partovi highlight the grave situation facing artists and freedom of expression in an otherwise oppressive Iranian regime. For, as long as they continue to fight the system from within and make films, I am happy to watch and recommend them.

www.theframeloop.com