No Bears

NO BEARS   ***1/2

Jafar Panahi

2022

IDEA:  Jafar Panahi, playing a version of himself, directs a film remotely while holed up in a small town on the Iranian border. As he does so, he becomes embroiled in a scandal among the locals.

BLURB:  Under draconian state persecution – entailing a travel ban and a nominal ban on filmmaking – Jafar Panahi has for over a decade maintained a resilient, thriving creative spirit that inspires nothing short of awe. No Bears is another of his intrepid, formally frisky acts of political defiance whose sheer existence signifies the triumph of art over oppressive regimes. Panahi specifically embraces the power of fiction storytelling to sublimate anger and protest while exposing and amplifying truths that reality itself tries to conceal. In No Bears, he has leveraged the conditions of his privation to imagine a parable, at once sly and straightforward, of both his own persecution and that of so many others living in Iran. Here his character is, essentially himself, perched in sociopolitical limbo in a rural border town, forced to direct his film remotely via Zoom. Meanwhile, he is increasingly hounded by the authorities for a photograph he might have taken, one that agitates the village’s entrenched religious customs. Crafty in his articulation of space, Panahi uses his filmmaking to capture and obliterate the borders set up around him. His camera moves seamlessly from Turkey to Iran through a laptop screen; social hierarchies are dissolved in his Bazinian wide shots and democratic delegation of cinematography; even the doorways he’s pervasively framing seem structurally tenuous. But borders do exist, and they can be intransigent. Panahi’s character learns this the hard way as his best intentions yield bloodshed, the power of his status as an image-maker inadvertently opening himself and others up to real harm. As frequently playful and funny as it is, No Bears ends with a bleakness that suggests someone realizing they may have finally run out of road.