Updates, Live: Jafar Panahi: The Mirror (1997)

Mina, a young girl, finds her mother has failed to pick her up from school, so she decides to walk home on her own. The movie is about her endeavor to find her way home amidst the noise, confusion and chaos of Tehran. Mina is dressed in traditional Iranian clothing (with a head scarf), has one arm in a cast and is holding a school bag in the other. She meets a lot of people on her way and most of them try to help her while others are surprisingly apathetic to her situation. This movie beautifully captures the little girl's progress from timidity to cautious bravery. Eventually the movie takes a turn when the girl looks into the camera for the first time and someone shouts Mina, don't look into the camera and the movie is a real life capture of events thereon (at least it seems like that). Mina announces that she doesn't want to act in the movie any more and wants to go home. So, she actually becomes the character she is portraying. It is not clear if this is part of the screenplay and made to look that way or if it's really like that. In the end she goes home after returning the microphone. Presumably the name Mirror comes from this transition of reel life into real life and mirroring its story.

(wikipedia)

The Mirror (آینه - Ayneh) , made in 1997 by Jafar Panahi. It is his second feature and received in the year of its release the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Two other awards followed the next year: the Golden Tulip at the Istanbul Film Festival and the Silver Screen at the Singapore Film Festival.

It starts with a little girl trying to get home from school by herself, and as in any story of this kind, there are all kind of funny events. It is always interesting to see the world of grown ups through the eyes of a kid, also the Ciné-Vérité style of the movie is amazing in catching the street universe of today's Tehran.

All this is true, but after five minutes you start asking yourself what's the big deal. As director Jafar Panahi is known to be one of the big names in the Iranian movie world you'd expect with each new film coming from him to see something really new. The Mirror came in 1997, two years after The White Balloon, another movie with kids: that one had been remarkable. Was The Mirror just an attempt to live on the account of the previous movie?

Well, no. First of all, the universe is very different in the two movies. The White Balloon pictures a world in fair tale tones: it's from the girl point of view. In The Mirror the universe is also interacting with the girl reaction, but it's clearly the universe of Tehran street, as it is really. It's a delight: it's a poem dedicated to the chaos and trepidation of the street of a large Mid Eastern city, where modernity and specificity collide.

Actually both movies are in some way deceptive. The kid story hides a deeper level. It is made known in The White Balloon just at the end. Here in The Mirror this deeper level enters the center of stage in the mid of the story. It does it abruptly: the girl declares out of the blue that she doesn't want to play any more in the movie! She just wants to leave and go home truly by herself! The incident takes place in a crowded bus, and suddenly we notice that there are no passengers there, just the crew surrounded by equipment. Director Jafar Panahi is in the bus, sited near the cameraman, and he doesn't know what the hell to do. He decides to follow anyway the girl with candid camera. As one of the reviewers observed, that moment makes the movie a masterpiece! We had in the first half Ciné-Vérité, now we have simply Vérité.

They faint to forget taking the mike back from the girl, so the camera will follow her and the sound will be captured. Sometimes the camera looses the girl, while the sound continues to be heard. Some other times we see the girl, but the sound is missing. On her way home the girl encounters an old lady who played in the first part and now is complaining about the conditions of filming, about the director, etc. A man recognizes the girl as he has seen the shooting of a scene two weeks earlier: we have seen the same scene twenty minutes ago, in the first part. We meet then the man who recommended the girl for the film production. And so we are forced to realize that the first part was a movie, while this second part is no more. What is it then? Well, it is kind of movie, of course: in the same time a movie about its own making and a movie deconstructing itself.

Two questions arise here. Firstly, is the first part a movie, or just reality caught with (candid) camera? Because everything seems too natural to be a movie. And secondly, is the second part reality caught with candid camera, or just a movie telling a story about a girl and a candid camera? Frankly, we'll never know.

So, beyond the story of the little girl, funny and interesting, beyond the universe of Tehran streets, remarkably rendered, there is the hidden level: The Mirror is interested to study the relation between movie and reality. Panahi is interested here in the issue tackled by Kiarostami in almost all his movies!

The tile comes from this hidden level: for Panahi a movie is a mirror of the reality. And the mirror works in both ways: for Panahi also the reality is a mirror of the movie.

To analyze this relation I am tempted to use the Niebuhr model (see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture). It could sound blasphemous, but I think we can see in the relationship between art and reality the same types that H. Richard Niebuhr discovered in the relationship between Christian religion and culture. I will come back to this issue, as it seems extremely interesting for me. I have here on the blog a post discussing the book of Niebuhr; it is in Romanian and maybe I should start by translating that post into English.

I think the way Panahi sees the relationship between movie and reality is in terms of paradox: movie and reality are different; the movie remains a prisoner of the reality, regardless of any efforts to escape; the reality remains prisoner of the movie, though it's unaware. That the movie is the prisoner of the reality, that we can grasp. Why is the reality, in turn, the prisoner of the movie? I think for two reasons: because of the Big Brother presence (what else is a candid camera?), also because it is in the nature of reality the tendency to embellish itself.

So the two categories, movie and reality, are condemned to live together, though each one tries to run away. A tragedy defined by a paradox. It's the way Luther or Kierkegaard were seeing the relationship between a Christian living his faith and the universe surrounding him.

I will come back to this.

------------------------------
Here are some excerpts from the movie:

A young schoolgirl (Mina Mohammad Khani) navigates the busy streets of Tehran after her mother fails to pick her up from school. The story takes on a whole new level when the actress playing the girl quits the production and the camera in turn follows the actress's journey home.

(video by FirouzanFilms)

The little girl stares at two engaged people. A street musician with his son playing darbuka performs a short piece with his accordion. An emotional one...