They say that everyone’s a critic, and in the esteemed Iranian director’s latest film, No Bears, Jafar Panahi takes the truism to heart. Even when taking a secluded vacation in a village near the Turkish border, Panahi (playing himself) can’t help but bump into critics.
Panahi spends as much time as he can with his camera, either attempting to direct a film via video call — while the village is accommodating, it also has poor reception — or taking photographs around town. Jaunty exploration is of so much importance that Panahi defers the videography for a local wedding to his host, Ghanbar (Vahid Mobasheri).
No Bears takes its time as we explore the town along with Panahi; there’s ample time to acclimate to the village’s vertical architecture and its charm — its colour, kids, and cats — and thus, to the film’s style. Long takes abound, with a priority towards background information. With the sense of play brought out whenever Panahi stoops and leans in for the perfect shot, we’re brought into a state of urgentless attentiveness akin to playing “Where’s Waldo?” Michel Chion observed that the increase in dynamic range brought on by Dolby allowed for “‘dreamed voices’ on the threshold between silence and whispering,” and in that same sense, the use of deep focus here is oneiric: the more this sequence continues, the less real it feels.
The priority of background details which lulls the viewer is also that which brings the critics out in force. The entire village presumes Panahi to have caught evidence of a tryst between a young couple: Gozal (Darya Alei) and Solduz (Amir Davar). Solduz lived out of town until recently and is trying to keep his return secret; Gozal has been betrothed to another man, Jacob (Javad Siyahi), since birth. Being a man of good standing here, Solduz’s loyalty is a matter of his reputation, which in turn threatens the village’s. In a reverse scenario of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Panahi and the audience are skeptical of what they’re supposed to have seen, while everyone else from the town sheriff (Naser Hashemi), to the couple in question, insist otherwise.
The villagers’ grave suspicions and utmost respect towards Panahi form a comedy of manners, exemplified as a crowd follows him as he recreates his outing, with each man putting his shoes on one by one as they exit a house onto its adjoining balcony. For Panahi to defuse the situation is as simple as handing over his camera and SD card (whether or not the photo in question exists and was surreptitiously deleted is up to the viewer). The gesture is enough for the sheriff, but not for Jacob: the only way to settle this is to go to the village’s swearing room. Wanting to get it all over with, Panahi assents to swear on a Qur’an that evening. Along with Jacob and the sheriff, a crowd of citizens have scrunched themselves into the otherwise spartan building.
In front of all these people, Panahi makes the spontaneous request that he might instead take an oath his own way: by recording it on camera — which he reveals to have been toting around from the start. “He wants to record his own witnessing!” the sheriff cries in astonishment, while managing to maintain his sense of courtesy.
The camera does seem to be Panahi’s religion. And whether or not it’s his reason for being, it is at least his reason for being in seclusion. Since 2010, Panahi has been banned by the Iranian government from making films, either as director or screenwriter, as well as from leaving the country or making media appearances. The charges for the ban and concurrent arrest were, according to the government, “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” While the official statement is materially vague, it’s all but a given that it was in response to Panahi’s vocal involvement with the Green Movement, who contested the 2009 reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (multiple articles on his arrest make the uncited claim that he was working on a documentary on the Green Movement). No Bears, which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is his fifth illegally-directed feature film.
There is no doubt that Panahi is aware of the inherent risk posed by making No Bears, and that his ideas are viewed as dangerous by his government. One could easily assume that his decision to star as himself — a trend that he has maintained since his first arrest — is part of an effort to interpellate his art’s resistance; the refusal to swear on a Qur’an could be one in a series of refusals pointed at a theocratic state.
Rather, Panahi portrays himself as being out of touch and absent-minded as to the political implications of his actions. Filming — being a witness — is second nature, to the point of making the director look like a sleepwalker. When Panahi has to decline the sheriff after he requests that the director take his oath in Azerbaijan, the language of his parents, the meaning is clear: Panahi’s art has made him a sleepwalker devoid of any identity. No Bears’ ambiguity as to whether there even was a scandalous picture to begin with is also a pointed finger at Panahi, painting him as a coward who would rather stay in the dark if knowing means he would have to act.
Here we might be running into what Orson Welles referred to as “Chaplin disease”: “To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world — a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups.” However, Panahi raises No Bears above the status of a vanity project by fully committing to his lack of identity, instead using himself as a lens through which the film examines what it means to live authentically in a state of perpetual exile.
Panahi is in a place where it’s easy to smuggle himself across the border — rumours that he intends to do so dog him from the start of his stay — but the question remains: what is there left in him to forget? He seems to be playing this question out by shooting his latest film in a nearby Turkish town. The film, whose troubled production comprises No Bears’ B-plot, is about a couple (Bakhtiar Panjei and Mina Kavani) who are themselves trying to escape to Europe. The conflict is not in getting the passport of a European look-alike, but in getting two that are valid at the same time; there is no guarantee of one leaving with the other, and without love, neither is complete. Ever the neorealist, Panahi — his fictional self, that is — is using an actual couple going through the process of getting illegal passports. The real Panahi has cast Kavani, a professional actor, and her “true” character relays the pain of having to adopt an untrue identity in order to escape a life of oppression. The biggest critics the fictional Panahi has to face are brought about by his own artistic choices. Some things are only possible once we leave the cinematic dreamland.
Is No Bears a fable whose moral is its own pointlessness? Or that it exists only as a tale of a sedentary way of life? Being still does not necessarily mean being compliant: what No Bears seeks is to be a vigilant film. The shot’s background is a playground, but it is also the place where people have to wait for others to arrive. No Bears weaves together the stories of two loves doomed to separation, and in doing so, defies fatalism. While film, in its endless witnessing, can never replace genuine action, it can at least show us what signals to look for.
The Green Movement is over, but there have been many more protests in its wake, both in Iran and across the Middle East. No Bears lives in that wake, showing us only a fraction of the present, and opening us up to the future it cannot show. In his retrospective on the Green Movement, Hamid Dabashi echoes this sentiment too beautifully:
Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf shadows, Israel, the United States and its European allies systematically trespass national boundaries – and so liberation movements must hide and then seek each other from one tyranny to [the] next. The Iranian Green Movement, the Palestinian Intifada and the Arab Spring are all like beautiful water lilies floating on the surface of the same expansive pond, nourished by the same subterranean gestations.
