No Bears, the latest masterpiece by dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, begins on a bustling shopping street in Turkey, where the shouts of vendors mix with street music as young people come and go from a nearby cafe. There, a beautiful woman named Zara (Mina Kavani) awaits her partner, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei), with whom she hopes to emigrate to France. When she appears, an argument ensues, and the camera, which hasn’t cut since the film began, discreetly captures every nuance of their alliance and conflict.
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Then something extraordinary happens: the camera pulls back to inform us that not everything is as it seems. This is just the first of a myriad of revelatory moments that Panahi orchestrates with his trademark skill in a story that doubles and divides, at one moment becoming something resembling a Persian folk tale, at another a commentary on filmmaking. on par with The American Night.
Panahi plays a version of himself as a director forced to remain in Iran by the authorities and therefore placed in the strange position of working with his cast and crew remotely, over a choppy Internet. Meanwhile, he has decided to move from Tehran to a remote village near the Turkish border, where his celebrity and political notoriety make him a figure of both fascination and quiet condescension.
In “There are no bears”, Jafar Panahi faces censorship from his country’s regime
Panahi interprets the urban-rural divide for Kafkaesque absurdity, as he becomes embroiled in an outlandish misunderstanding involving a photograph he may or may not have taken. The thing is, Panahi never stops filming, even if he has to hire a neighbor to film a commitment ceremony in a nearby river. “Always keep the camera in front of you,” he warns the new auteur, as good advice as any for an art form that demands a commitment that borders on obsession.
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No Bears would be very appealing simply as a wryly funny fish-out-of-water story, with some fun movie-within-a-movie metatext. But as Panahi’s stories mirror and coalesce, his deepest observations become sobering and ultimately deeply moving.
The title There Are No Bears is the culmination of a sequence that has to do with the stories we tell ourselves to reassure ourselves, only to lock ourselves in fear, distrust, and internalized arbitrary limits. Although Panahi’s treatment at the hands of the Iranian authorities is almost always mentioned obliquely, it influences every inch of physical and psychic space in the director’s small, primitive world.
Jafar Panahi’s latest work unfolds in layers, from the superficiality of a domestic conflict to the complexities of censorship and the fight for artistic freedom
The fact that There Are No Bears premiered in Venice just before Panahi was sent to Evin Prison in July 2023, adds another layer of poignancy to a work of art that epitomizes how, in the most skillful and judicious of hands, allegory and allusion can make political statements more devastatingly poignant.
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And There Are No Bears is a work of art. Despite the simplicity and clarity of its narrative, this is a film of breathtaking sophistication, from its elegant camerawork (Panahi prefers long, subtly swashbuckling takes) to its virtually invisible editing, which seamlessly intertwines geographically separated stories. that their meanings become cumulatively clear: everyone attempts to enter or leave, with greater or lesser success, either asking permission to enter someone’s house, in the case of the villagers who harass Panahi for his supposed transgression, or refusing to do so. , in the case of young emigrants in love.
As for the filmmaker himself – both himself and the version of himself he plays – he seems to embody ambivalence, as he moves away from authoritarian censorship and oppression and into the world of global cinema, and is pushed from return to the country where he feels obliged to bear witness.
February 2023: Jafar Panahi is greeted by his friends upon leaving Evin prison, in Tehran, Iran (Photo: Yasna Mirtahmasb/WANA/Handout via REUTERS)
That moral tug-of-war animates a film that brims with vitality, humor, and Panahi’s signature wry, unfailingly compassionate humanism. At one point, he criticizes a scene he has just shot and points out that a certain camera movement has resulted in an idle frame. There are no such lapses in this film, where every moment has not only purpose, but captivating beauty. It is no less gratifying that Jafar Panahi has, once again, made a film worthy of his own level of demand.
Fuente: The Washington Post.
2024-01-18 13:05:40
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