Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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The cost of Europe

By Hani Mustafa

What to say about the presence of Iranian film in the Cairo International Film Festival? In the last few years Iranian cinema has monopolised the attention of film lovers all over the world, by dint of both popular appeal and international acclaim -- so much so that for many Egyptian intellectuals the number of Iranian films seen has come to determine the degree to which a viewer might be considered cultured and discerning. The drive to make movies that emerge directly from Iranian culture and society even as they are forced to respect the decrees of the Iranian censor has placed directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf in the front ranks of world cinema.

Following drastic cuts in government expenditure on cinema, it was therefore only inevitable that Iranian directors (following in the footsteps of Arab filmmakers like the Tunisians Moufida Talatli, Nouri Bouzid and Farid Boughedir) should eventually choose to embark on European co-productions. And the censure levelled at such endeavours derives primarily from ideological and political concerns about the influence that a European funder might exercise over the Iranian artist's vision. Comments about the exoticisation of culture, while posing a threat to the reputation of the above mentioned Tunisian filmmakers, will stir even more trouble in the Islamic republic, whose current oppositional role in world affairs is regarded by many in and outside Iran as more important than art.

Screened as part of the Festival of Festivals programme, Jafar Panahi's The Circle (winner of the golden lion in the Venice Festival last September) uses an innovative technique to tell the story of a number of women and the journeys they undertake in flight from the police. Starting with the birth of one of them, the film progresses smoothly, but the viewer does not fully realise how the stories connect with each other until all the women -- one of whom is clearly a prostitute are finally gathered in the police station, their various journeys having come full circle. The film is a powerful statement about life in Iran, but the director's perspective is not always an Iranian one. When he makes a point of describing how women are not supposed to smoke in public, for example, one cannot help feeling that Panahi is adopting a Western, rather than grass-roots, cultural stance. This is said to reduce the Iranian viewer's capacity for smooth cultural identification with characters.

By contrast, Kiarostami's Life Goes On -- screened in the same programme -- is autobiographical in tone. Unobtrusively it depicts the journey by car of a father and his son in search of the small, earthquake-shattered village in which the father (Kiarostami?) has already filmed Where Is My Friend's House. But the film is ultimately reminiscent of Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherries (winner of the Cannes Palm d'Or in 1997). The action drags on a little, but Kiarostami's slowness allows him to invest the narrative with a poetic weight (the film's pace reflects the filmmaker's state of mind), and the intimately observed detail -- a squabble between father and son concerning who is playing who in the football match which, being on this journey, they could not follow on television; repeated images of people bearing heavy gas cylinders -- lends the action a rare and moving dimension. As much as anything, Kiarostami's is a film about boredom, the boredom of a unique protagonist.

The film's immense meditative capacity is arguably its most powerful feature, however. There is no crude symbolism here, only evocation, whether through imagery or dialogue. That the credits appear on the screen prior to the car reaching its destination cannot be regarded simply as a symbol for the open-ended nature of life. Indeed this is a very particular journey whose nature can only be explicated in relation to a particular set of (social, political, even autobiographical) circumstances. And unlike Panahi, Kiarostami, whose film was not coproduced by European countries, is very careful not to include a perspective that is not wholly Iranian.

The note on which the film ends is metaphorically potent. After ignoring a gas cylinder-bearer who has been trying to hitch a ride, the car fails repeatedly to get to the top of the slope. Giving up, the father drives back until the car exits the frame, by which time the cylinder bearer, catching up on foot, has already passed it. One hears the sound of the engine and the car re-enters the frame, picks up the cylinder bearer and disappears into the heights.

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