A film that depicts the events which transform the lives of several Iranian women throughout the course of one day - the hardships they endure, the oppression they must face and finally, the courage they must draw from one another. Their lives are interweaved with such touching simplicity showing that even in the midst of such despair and hardship, the human spirit can triumph. Another original, vital and exciting Iranian film.
Opening on the cries and wails of a woman giving birth, this new film by the director Jafar Panahi takes us right into the centre of a bustling, noisy Iran to highligh... more >
Opening on the cries and wails of a woman giving birth, this new film by the director Jafar Panahi takes us right into the centre of a bustling, noisy Iran to highlight what happens to women without official I.D. cards, whose existence - tucked away under convoluted strips of black fabric - is continually denied by the State. Even though this fictional feature has characters who are grandmothers, students, dissidents, child-abandoners and prostitutes, it’s worth remembering several Iranian filmmakers have suffered such oppression of late in the real world, and have been censored and even jailed for their work.
In a cinematic conceit pioneered in La Ronde and later worked through in entertainments as varied as Slacker and Chain Of Desire, we follow each character only briefly before they hand the narrative baton, as it were, on to the next participant. It’s a gimmick which takes on an extra resonance here: where the characters in Slacker were free to say what they like, and those in La Ronde and Chain Of Desire free to wear as much or as little as they want in order to promote their sexuality, those females doing the walking and talking in The Circle are routinely arrested and carted off, have doors slammed in their faces, and are liable to fates even worse than these if they were to exercise any similar freedom.
The result is a film in places as disturbing and as hard to watch as any straight horror movie released this year. The student’s story focuses on a young girl with an almost pathological reluctance to get on the buses she’s supposed to be on - the ones which will take her to "paradise", and away from the city’s various vicious circles and cycles - so it’s almost no surprise, but deadening to the stomach, when she’s left stranded. The dissident’s tale seems to be heading back towards the hospital in which the film started, offering a falling-out between friends - pure soap opera - as a false finale, but then heads off in pursuit of a paranoid, after-dark strand involving a woman on the run from her own infant daughter.
To watch these Iranian films is to know something of what it must have been like to see the first neo-realist films coming out of Italy at the end of the second World War. Certainly, they share their austere, effective editing, patient camerawork and performances of such remarkable verisimilitude that it is hard to know where the acting stops and the non-professionals take over. Panahi and screenwriter Kambozia Partovi offer a potent portrayal of life in a city and in a country in which there is simply no way out: though they bring the film back to the image - if not the sound - which began this particular loop of celluloid, the sense is that the crying and wailing will go on beyond the end credits and for as long as this regime continues.
Reminiscent of Ophuls' La Ronde in its rondelay structure, Panahi's film traces a woman's fraught trajectory through contemporary Iran, a society made by men for men. ... more >
Reminiscent of Ophuls' La Ronde in its rondelay structure, Panahi's film traces a woman's fraught trajectory through contemporary Iran, a society made by men for men. Angry and riveting in its all-out critique of everyday persecution, this is another episode in the rise and rise of Iranian cinema. < less
