Le miroir

This gimmick was so good that it has never been done again since. It's like going on after a fumble, you pick it up and end the play but it will not be the best, it will not be beautiful but this fumble will get you to score a point. It's an interesting exercise, one that will spark debates because you either go with it or no. I get either side of the fence.

It's not cinema, but it is a meta-commentary on fact and fiction. Don't we always say that "life beats film" - then why is this not the best film ever? You still have to separate the two - or you make a documentary. This feels like due to financial constraints you continue with a mistake, and double down...

Monsieur Panahi cannot resist a bit of metafiction. In this case the metafiction becomes the subject of the second part of the movie, as his lead child actress finds herself in the exact same predicament as the girl she was playing, running through the streets of Tehran, talking to all sorts of people, trying to get home. Only it starts to feel a little too gimmicky and I lost interest. Plus the fact that they were watching her from a distance, but still I couldn't help but feel they were endangering her.

Anyway, Tehran traffic is hellish and I'd be scared as an adult, let alone a child. But this kid just cannot sit still to save her life. It's true we would not have a movie otherwise, but basically stay in the playground and wait for your mother to come pick you up.

This is a film about a girl going home. Apparently her mother failed to pick our little heroine up, and the feisty second grader sets out to find her way through the asphalt jungle all by herself. Well, there's more to it of course. It's the asphalt jungle of Tehran and the film was directed by Jafar Panahi, one of the innovative film makers of the Iranian New Wave. Not that his latest works are allowed to be shown in his home country, mind you. Sentenced to a six-year jail term in 2010 and banned from directing he nevertheless defiantly made an iPhone production called "This Is Not a Film" about his situation and managed to smuggle it out of Iran and tell the world.

The Iranian situation as such is already portrayed firsthand in Panahi's early 1997 film. A representative of the next generation, a child, in the center, we witness its abandonment by the adults. We eavesdrop on them complaining, but not really listening, observe the gender segregation on public transport (albeit through an innocent perspective in between as the missing link), but in a sea of scarves, uniform looks and the all encompassing everyday turmoil one can barely get a glimpse of something one could call "individuality"... In the words of Panahi: Everyone is wearing a mask, plays a role. Thanks to the stark realism present in Iranian movies we become part of the life and the hustle and bustle therein, get sucked in by following the odyssey through a child's eye. And we'll reach a point in the film where a clever twist cranks it all even up a notch. Thus a very real situation turns even more real and it results in a powerful reflection with a double meaning, within the film and outside of it. As in his preceding picture "The White Balloon", also centering on a cast of children, the tone in Panahi's "The Mirror" is light, and the film is entertaining throughout, yet layered and thought-provoking. There's someone who stands up to find a way, lost, but determined, wandering around in need for directions. But there's a fundamental difference between directions and direction, as the viewer might notice. No coincidence either that this someone we're talking about is a girl, the focus of some of Panahi's other works. Or let's say it that way: This is not a film... about a girl going home.

The fact that this film is set in Tehran makes it more then just a good little "slice of life" film. The setting and story give us a glimpse into ordinary life in one of the places that we westerners only read about in the newspapers and then only when bad things are happening there.

The story chronicles second grade student Mina's eventful trip home from school on a day that her mother fails to show up to take her home. Mina travels by scooter, bus, taxi and on foot through the frantic traffic of downtown Tehran. On her way home she meets with and overhears conversations by many different people from an old woman, to a police officer, to a auto mechanic. Mina also manages to quit the movie about half way through yet her odyssey continues anyway hence the film's title. Mina is very fresh and cute, the bit players are all very real and the trip home from school is fraught with situations that waiver between poignient to funny. Everything adds up to a film well worth watching.

Iranian director Jafar Panahi recently got arrested, charged with propaganda. He is sentenced to six years in jail and is banned from making movies for twenty years. This makes his 1997 movie "The Mirror" ("Ayneh" in Farsi) all the more interesting. The movie depicts a girl wandering Tehran's chaotic streets looking for her mother. Suddenly, she decides that she doesn't want to play the part anymore! First time that I've ever seen that happen in a movie.

The only other Panahi movie that I've seen is "Offside", about women getting kept from attending a soccer game, officially because the men's legs are showing. Judging by that, and by the conversations that the girl hears on the bus in "The Mirror", Panahi is not a director whose films really please Iran's authorities. There should be no doubt as to why he now languishes in jail. And above all, I truly recommend this movie.