May 24–31, 2001

movies

What Goes Around...

The director of The Circle — shaped by life in Iran, but shaping it as well.

by Sam Adams

Sphere here: The Circle’s Jafar Panahi.

Jafar Panahi’s The Circle is, if such a thing is possible, an elliptical diatribe, a film both didactic and abstract. The 40-year-old Iranian is best known here for his films The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997), both of which deal with headstrong girls who pursue their dreams in spite of the obstacles the world sets in their way. But in The Circle, which deals with women instead of girls, the obstacles take center stage. Passing from character to character (à la Slacker), Panahi charts how each woman is oppressed, curtailed, limited by Iranian society. Eventually the film does come full circle, ending up where it began: in a women’s prison.

Speaking on the phone from his translator’s house outside New York, Panahi explains that, despite the controversy the film has sparked in Iran, where the government has prevented its being shown, he never intended to make a political film.

"I have no interest [in] making political films," he says, through the translator. "To me a political film is one with an expiration date attached to it, and the problem with that is the minute you lose the validity of the ideology of the policy that [such] films advocate, the films themselves become worthless. But having said that, I know I am making movies with social significance and social ramifications, and that social issue is generated by some policy, some politics behind it. So in that regard, if someone makes a political interpretation of my film, I have no problem with that."

The Circle began, Panahi says, when he began to think about the characters in his previous two films, and what might have happened to them after the story ended. "Sometime I would think about what would happen to them when they grow up, especially to their sense of courage and boldness," he recalls. "In those two movies, we see two girls who are really determined to get what they want, and I always wondered if they could have the same quality, or if they would be overwhelmed by the adult world."

The other impetus for the story was a since-forgotten newspaper item from an unknown country, about a mother who had killed her two children and then committed suicide.

"Just reading about it, something stuck in my mind," he explains. "I would think that woman must’ve been really helpless and had no choice but to kill herself. The main idea for me was a circle in which people are trapped. That woman must have found that circle too oppressive to break away from."

Despite those inspirations, Panahi paints his focus on female characters as almost accidental, a byproduct of the themes that interest him rather than an outgrowth of any specific agenda. "It wasn’t really by intention that I was drawn to stories with strong women characters," he says. "It’s just a requirement of the ideas themselves. With The Circle, I wanted to make a movie about limitations, the restrictions that are imposed on people, and I figure one group of people who are really oppressed are women in my country."

Again, he returns to the idea that the world around him dictates the films he makes. The Iranian government, he says, has never been exactly clear as to what about the film was objectionable, through it’s clear the negative image of Iranian society was a major sticking point. But, says Panahi, "If the image of life in Iran that the film is portraying is found unpleasant, it’s not because of the way I’ve portrayed it; it’s because of the situation itself." He points to that morning’s U.S. news, which is full of a school shooting on the West Coast. "That tells me that your schools are not safe, that there are security problems there. But I’m not going to blame the television for broadcasting that."

Like many other Iranian filmmakers, Panahi is profoundly influenced by neorealists like Vittorio De Sica, who made Bicycle Thief in an Italy laid waste by World War II. Iranian filmmakers in the post-revolutionary era, Panahi ventures, have been inspired by De Sica precisely because the circumstances of their time mirror De Sica’s own.

"The conditions that led to the creation of the neorealist film movement are similar to the social conditions we experienced in Iran after the war," he says. "Filmmakers always have to respond to the social environment. If the social environment dictates that you make certain movies, you make them."

See Sam Adams’ review in Movie Shorts.