Dayereh

Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Golden Lion winner of 2000, "Dayereh", is a critical and extremely powerful film about women who suffer from the injustices of the laws of the Islamic Republic.

As an atheist I support no religions, and I do not think one is better or more respectful to human lives than any other. "Dayereh" is a film that is concerned with religion only as far as it is a film that takes place in Iran, a country where Islamic Law dominates or even rules over the secular law. I am not an expert on Iranian law, but I do hold "Dayereh" to be the TRUTH, not a propaganda fiction of no concern to reality. Therefore, I admire Iranian directors who constantly produce magnificent films although they have to battle against censorship and the strict rule of the Ayatollah. This perhaps forces filmmakers to adapt a more poetic film semiotics, perhaps only suggesting cruelty and injustice, not showing it directly like Western directors are allowed to do.

Like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami before him, Jafar Panahi has succeeded in producing a small, but superb film. Kambuzia Partovi's script is great, linking the misfortune and fates of several young Iranian women together into a whole narrative. All four or five women (one is not as thoroughly described) have committed unlawful acts, but their crimes are not explicitly stated in the dialogue of the film. However, we understand that their crimes would not be considered near a crime in most other countries, because it is related to sex and female independence, not to real criminality. Bahram Badakshani's camera is always close to the women, and their acting is nothing less than brilliant. The tracking movement of the camera and the shots composed by a hand-held camera result in many long takes, where the actresses get to show their skill wihtout editing. This is also a marvellous success for the director Panahi.

This film also contains a subtle symbolic factor, namely the wish for several of the women to smoke a cigarette. Different interruptions and laws concerning females and cigarettes prevent the women to smoke until one of the last scenes, when a women is arrested for travelling alone in a car with a man to whom she is not married (prostitution?). When a male prisoner is lighting up his cigarette, the woman does the same, and this time no one stops her. The smoking of the cigarette is not a symbol of freedom, because all the young women end up back in prison, but the cigarette does create a symbol of escape, although it is an escape from society, and not from the persecution of women who act like human beings (in Iran, read men). The smoking becomes Virginia Woolf's room of their own, the escape from a society that does not want them to be free.

While Jafar Panahi's previous feature films dealt with children, with Dayereh he delves into the contentious issue of women's issues in a highly restrictive society, his native Iran. The film uses a narrative device that Tarantino might be proud to steal, with Panahi's camera following various women through their specific plights, often chasing them through the streets in handheld mode. At any moment, the camera may decide to follow a different character, and although the specific details of the various women's situations may differ, the oppression which is a part of their daily lives is consistently omnipresent. One feature of the film that is part and parcel of its roving camera approach is that there is very little in the way of exposition or denouement in any of the narrative threads. This however, seems to be the point of the entire exercise; in a society that treats women as a lower class of citizen, individual details and circumstances have no bearing on their ability to achieve anything without the presence or authority of a husband or father.

veryday occurrences such as the purchase of a bus ticket to the simple act of smoking a cigarette in public can (and does) result in mandatory incarceration for any woman at any time. The structure of the film gives the impression that literally any woman you might bump into on the streets of Tehran is caught in such a comprehensively prohibitive society that could lead to what could only be considered unconscionable drama in Western society.

Although there are no significant male characters in this story, Panahi uses the entire gender en masse to illustrate the peculiar double standards that have insinuated itself through the fabric of this society. Men are constantly harassing women with inappropriate lewd remarks to which there can obviously be no response to. Simultaneously, if a woman behaves in a manner anything less than perfectly virtuous, her liberty is instantly forfeit.

In one scene, a woman starts to stand up for herself against a casually tossed piece of innuendo, and the audience can do nothing except anticipate the unjust retaliation that will surely be endorsed by the dozens of common passers-by. There are certain elements of the film that no doubt owe to the nature of making a film under these conditions; extras occasionally can't avoid staring at the camera crew, but strangely enough, this gives the film a feel of documentary film-making that somehow enhances the narrative. Nevertheless, there is nothing amateurish about the acting of the principal women, all of whom behave so convincingly that the film conveys a sense of constant danger. Furthermore, this nervous energy never lets up, as we move from story to story at a speed that allows us to experience discomfort, without reaching closure until the final scene, which in itself is a cause for distress.

It is unlikely that Dayereh will ever be a very popular film, as it has many of the 'feel-bad' qualities of films such as A Time For Drunken Horses, with even less sympathetic sentimentality. On an even sadder note, Dayereh has been banned in Iran, where a film of this nature most desperately needs to reach an audience. However, this seems to be the underlying message of the film; not that there are a great many injustices against women occurring in Iran on a daily basis, but that there is no indication of how or when it will stop. Only why.

"The Circle" adds to the genre of grim, depressing, didactic feminist movies made by men on non-Anglo cultures that we have seen little on to challenge their viewpoint, such as the Israeli "Kadosh" and the Indian "Bandit Queen." Like the latter, it was banned in its home country, according to the film poster.

The beginning of "The Circle" felt like an out-of-kilter futuristic sci fi movie, as a few chadored women move through a male-crowded modern city (I presume Teheran) filled with the latest contemporary commercial goods.

And the revolutionary society of Iran shown here feels a lot like those futuristic sci fi movies and books influenced by "1984" that presumed that dictatorships of the future would control sex and feelings (as opposed to the dictatorship we actually have in the West of anything goes).

From the jolting opening that gradually challenges our expectations, the most creative part of the movie is how it very slowly reveals the background of each woman as each accidentally crosses paths with others (a similar technique is employed in "Amores Perres").

For each, the only thing that keeps them going is reaching out for female solidarity and support, which results from the regime accidentally throwing them together.

Everyone walking out of the theater turned to each other in unison and said "That was depressing!"

The "circle" in Jafar Panahi's great film is many things: the

structure of the film itself, which ends with the same image it

begins with; a location in Teheran, where a character meets a

friend in a movie theater; the circular stairs so many other

characters run up and down; the circling, hovering camera

movements that bring us face to face with the women in these

interlinked stories and the world they are caught in. Most of all,

perhaps, it is the constricting circle within which Iranian women

must live their lives, the tightly circumscribed rules and

expectations of a rigidly masculine universe. None of Panahi's

characters can escape this circle, though some try and one, at

least, believes that she can. The more experienced know the truth;

all they can do in running is map out the circumference of their

shrunken world.

It's easy to see The Circle as a film about the oppression of

women in Iran, but that would reduce it to the merely political--and

we should not forget that the film was made by an Iranian man,

and that three quarters of the Iranian electorate recently voted to

reelect President Khatami, a deeply intelligent voice for freedom

and dialogue who has had his own difficulties being heard.

Panahi's subject is far larger; a woman who grew up in an abusive

household told me that no other film had so accurately depicted

the experience of her youth, when the constraints on women's

lives were so much taken for granted that she was unaware there

was anything outside them. But those constraints are fatal. We

make our world together, through dialogue and interaction. To

deprive someone of voice and the chance to participate in that

process is to kill them, whether it is done through religious and

social sanctions or by a husband beating his wife. Panahi's

women are neither dead nor silent, even though their only

listeners are other women. Their tragedy finds echoes everywhere;

but in this film where theme and expression are so intimately

joined we, at least, can hear them.

After making two feature films and many short films on children, director Jafar Panahi makes a film The Circle where he deals with the condition of a wider gamut of the female gender (a girl child, a girl toddler left behind for adoption. a wide-eyed teenage girl, a pregnant mother whose spouse has been executed, a prostitute, the only wife of an expatriate doctor, the less-preferred first wife of a husband with two wives, a grandmother who wishes for a male grandchild, a possibly unmarried mother who can no longer support her girl child) in Iran.

"The circle" begins and ends with a name of a woman--Solmaz Gholami--being called out through a door hatch. Interestingly, the film never introduces us to this character. It is apparently the name of a woman who has given birth to a girl child. The film introduces us to the grandmother of the child who is informed by the nurse that the newborn is a girl. The hatch belongs to a white door of an operation theater in a hospital.

The film ends with the same name being called out from a similar hatch of another door—this time a prison door of a room that holds most of the female adult characters in the film rounded up for varied offenses. Implicitly the film states that women face discrimination from birth until death in Iran. Evidently someone had stated a white lie earlier that the unseen Ms Gholami was to have a baby boy after an ultrasound test of the foetus. The revised information of the arrival of the girl child upsets the grandmother who wants a boy grandchild.

In between the opening of the two hatches, the roving hand-held camera underlines the state of an unusual group of women in Teheran, without IDs or male support evading police and eve-teasing males. The viewer is informed that most of the women (except the grandmother and two children) have either been paroled from prison or have escaped prison and are therefore on the run from the cops. Their original crimes are never stated. One woman is picked up by the police while she is making a call from a public phone booth. Once imprisoned, the women are afraid of the blot in their lives to the extent that they hide it from their husbands! Were they imprisoned for sexual offenses? None of the women seem to be politically active. However, the film underlines one fact—-had they either a husband or a father, or even a student ID, they would have no problem. Some of these women who want to smoke a cigarette. They can only do so when the men (in the film, a policeman) are smoking in public!

Mr Panahi is able to present interesting aspects of intra-female bonding in Iran. Some women travel the extra mile to help other women in distress. Even a prostitute helps another woman to escape the police. Then there are women who do not help others because they do not want their husbands to know that they were once behind bars. A mother leaves her girl child in the street in the hope that a stranger will provide a better life for her child. Yet they do not wallow in self pity. Who are these women with no husbands and having shady pasts? They are definitely not the typical Iranian woman.

Any woman or sensitive man could be seduced by the subject of the film. However, the film ought to be evaluated beyond the obvious feminist issues—-it is a study of individuals born into any society that deprives them of equal privileges. One of the reasons for my argument is that many men shown in the film are caring men who help women in trouble rather than become their exploiters. Some policemen shown are corrupt, but some are decent chaps. Many men in the film do respect women. There are also intolerant men who are ready to kill their sister who is pregnant without a husband. "The circle" cannot be a feminist film merely just because the female form covered in burkha/chador indicates repression. The film is more humanist than feminist—which the director has claimed in interviews. One tends to agree with Mr Panahi on this point.

However, it is a fact that to abort a child in Iran is a difficult proposition as it would be in most countries today. It would be difficult in most countries for any young girl without an ID to take a long distance bus ride all alone in the night. Iranian women enjoy more relative freedom than their counterparts in Saudi Arabia—where women cannot even drive a car! Panahi's women in "The Circle" seem to be women who were incarcerated for some "unknown" crimes—-never clearly elucidated in the film except in the case of the prostitute. If they were political prisoners, there is no clue except that a pregnant woman states that her spouse has been recently executed for a crime. There is a wide eyed girl who has never seen her village in recent years, who makes the viewer wonder why she was imprisoned in the first place. Panahi's film seduces the viewer, until you begin to wonder, if even the fact that the film was banned in Iran, is a viewer-seduction tool (almost all good Iranian films are banned in Iran, even though they have no sex or violence, but are possibly remotely critical of the present regime). The film was shot in Teheran and evidently the government did not have any problems at that time with the script. And then, bingo, it gets banned!

"The circle" is an interesting film that offers considerable fodder for thought. As cinema, it is without doubt an intelligent work and deserved the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival. Yet it is a film that calls for close evaluation by an astute mind rather than the heart of an impartial impressionable viewer.