What we haven’t said enough about No bearsthe admirable film whose author, Jafar Panahi, is imprisoned, incommunicado, in the terrible prison of Evin, in Teheran, it is this.
Voices from Iran. His language. His musicality. Its hissing softness which suddenly amplifies into emphatic and heady vowels. His song. Its weak inflections. Its slow cadences. Persian.
Panahi’s body. This omnipresent body. This somewhat heavy body which, at first, smiles and which, as the drama progresses, becomes mysterious and serious. This silent and contemplative body. This weary body, but radiating an energy of resistance by logic, art and passion. The body of a man whom History has chosen in reverse and who has since explored all the paths of torment and misfortune. And his voice too, his words of which he is strangely stingy and which he pronounces with even more suavity – a mixture of distance and gentleness, of aristocratic casualness and seriousness.
His eye. His camera (therefore his eye) doubles in the sense that Claudel, in The Satin Slipper, invents the “double shadow”. Author and actor. Spying and spying. This village which we do not really know if it is a chosen or imposed retirement but which it is clear that it is made, in his eyes, to lead to a beautiful film. But the film which, conversely, is a crime; the image which is prohibited; the filmmaker’s equipment which is the occasional cause of at least two misfortunes; the artist watched, summoned to explain himself, censored, punished; and his modest house transformed into a Hitchcockian mousetrap to agreements by Bernard Hermann.
Panahi’s body again. We think of Amarcord and, even more, to Intervista. The Maestro, of course, is not the same. And everything opposes his laconicism, his immense silences, his long gazes charged with thought as the film progresses, and the prodigious chatter, in frieze, of the Italian master. But it is the same objective camera. The same way of making the film and showing how it is done. The same centripetal camera fixed on the artist who tells and plays what? his skin…
For who is Panahi here? A harassed filmmaker. Banned from cinema in his country and, step by step, in this village. Damn. But here is the coup de force. The filmmaker does not plead. Don’t defend yourself. He does not go elsewhere to see if there is better filming there. He could, of course. And these are two unforgettable scenes. The one, nocturnal, where he advances to the Turkish border before, with a start, stepping back. And then the diurnal, enigmatic scene at the end where, as if rearing at the idea of leaving the country of his language and his misfortune, his genius and his martyrdom, he pulls up the handbrake . Panahi judge of Jafar. The filmmaker’s target dissident. Accused, stay – and film if you can.
What movie is he doing? It is necessary, even if the word is overused, to say the unprecedented mise en abyme that constitutes it. The impeded filmmaker who directs, by Zoom, on the other side of the Turkish border. The Turkish scene which we understand is, for the troupe of Iranian actors, a second prison airlock. The newlyweds of the cinema, the splendid young woman whose loose hair has the effect of a bomb in Turkey as in Iran and the lanky and weak intellectual, diabetic and tragically in love, overtaken, in real life, by real death . Him, Panahi, of whom we no longer know, suddenly, if it is to film that he is being blamed or to have photographed, without thinking about it, a couple of illegitimate lovers. And then the ultimate and most dizzying mise en abyme: he photographed children, granted; then, laterally, a copse where you can see feet; but a couple? the veiled girl who comes, like a terrified ghost, to ask him for help and then disappears? the Shakespearean lover who comes, in turn, to beg him? and what meaning to give to the scene where the village, as one man, asks him to swear on the Koran that he did not photograph Romeo and Juliet and where he answers, to everyone’s amazement, that, rather than lend oath, he will make a statement, film it and give a copy to everyone?
A word must be said of the villagers who harass him. First the sweetness. A good-natured, obsequious, overplayed respect. One would believe the act II of the Dom John of Molière… Then, as soon as the inexorable partition of prejudice unfolds, under an exterior of innocence, a kind of rage, of inquisitive hatred, then of violence – the very one of which we understand, but implicitly, by which degrees it can lead you, once again, as in 2010, to Evin prison. No bears in the village. No wild and threatening beasts. Because it is the village itself, and Iran, and the sky over the cities of Iran, which are the bear.
Because there is one absent in the film. Tehran. The city of Panahi. The city where he languishes for having, like a great artist, stuck to the essentials – filming again and again. The city where today, as in all other cities in the country, free women and men are carrying out the real spiritual revolution that Iran hoped and expected. And the gang of mullahs who would like, in revenge, to transform into a desert this sublime land, warm, ocher and enhanced by miraculous trees with golden leaves. The persecutor, yes, is absent. But don’t we know that in the cinema, when he’s grown up, it’s what we don’t see that stands out?
When Jafar Panahi dances with the bears and gives a masterpiece