This goes on my year’s list, a great film about a sport that bores me silly. The film seems to be in real time, following first a man seeking his daughter who’s snuck off to see the Iranian team struggle with Bahrain’s for entrance into the World Cup, the catch being that women aren’t allowed to go to public sporting events. The film smoothly leaves the man behind, jumping to another van (as it passes by, flags waving, excited fans chanting) where a poorly-disguised woman nervously tries to avoid attention.
I was very impressed by the deceptively simple structure of the film, which must have been hell to film (and now having watched an interview I see that it largely was), yet seems effortlessly, energetically in the moment. The comedy builds gradually and compellingly, as the restrictions against the women sneaking in (and the attempts to enforce such restrictions by the hapless, unenthused guards) are so constantly, unaggressively ignored, undermined, sidestepped. By the last thirty minutes I was wrapped up in the group’s rapt attention to the game’s outcome, and in love with the film.
And–no surprise given my many, many, many nauseating posts to this effect on this blog–the comic energy of the film seemed fantastically, blithely subversive. (I recalled hearing, and then had confirmed in that interview with the director, that the film was banned in Iran, had no public showings… but was equally excited to hear that the black-market proliferation of the film seems to indicate its enormous popularity.)
Gio & Simon, I know you two saw it–and liked/loved it? Thoughts? I was enormously impressed by this, and need to see more of Panahi’s stuff.
i’ve wanted to second mike’s enthusiasm for this film since he wrote his review, which i now see what written almost four months ago! (gasp) i found this film exceptional. i loved the white balloon and i’m really looking forward to watching jafar panahi’s other films. first of all, we soccer fanatics think that, when it comes to bringing the world together across boundaries of everything, nothing, but nothing, beats the world cup. olympics? please. the UN? whatever. the nobel peace prize? oh-hum. so a film about the universality and barrier-shattering, category dismantling, carnivalesque dimension of the world cup is a winner in my heart even before it starts. i think there isn’t a single movie about the world cup that is not a paean to a love that transcends all sorts of confines. the magic of this film — and of white balloon — is that panahi takes on the whole world and its various silly strifes not through grand panoramas but through little vignettes centered on the rhetoric of daily negotiations.
in this case, the interactions are those among the young women who have been caught trying to sneak into the stadium and the soldiers who are in charge of keeping them corralled in a little pen just outside the stadium walls, from where they can all hear the roaring of the crowd inside. the main soldier is a farmer boy who seem entirely uninterested in the world cup and terminally anxious about his guarding duties. other soldiers are more into the game, and occasionally peak through the gate adjacent the pen to give a live rendering of what goes on on the field. but no one is more enthusiastic about the game than the girls, in particular a butch young woman with short hair, a baseball cap, and more aggressivity than all the soldiers put together.
panahi shot a lot of the film’s scenes during the actual game, and i think the energy mike mentions comes directly from the stadium, first, and from panahi’s self-imposed technical confines, second. since the film lasts exactly as long as the game, there’s in it the same palpable sense of rush against time that one experiences during an eliminatory match. you know what i’m talking about: the national anthems roll and your gut is already in a knot. i’m happy to hear that mike got caught in the game’s outcome, b/c i find it hard to imagine that anyone, even soccer shunners, would not.
the thing is, we don’t see a single scene of this game. not one shot of the players, not a tiny peak of the field, nothing. the game is entirely reflected in the girl’s faces and, at the end, in the faces and bodies of the crowd.
i found the farmer soldier and the butch girl the most interesting characters. this is iran for goodnessakes, the country we are trying to depict as a den of repression and barbarism so that we can safely bomb it. but, even though obviously outrageous in itself, the repression the soldiers effect on the girls is accomplished with remarkable gentleness and tameness (and even though what will happen to the girls afterwards is always hinted at but never stated, the girls seem far from terrified) i was stunned by the liberty and directness with which panahi subverts gender and takes on class. [***SPOILER***] i can think only of boys don’t cry for an american example of this same in-your-face subversion, which is kinda telling, since boys ends in catastrophe while this film ends in rapturous collective celebration and happy freedom. [/SPOILER]
even while penned inside police fences, the girls shout, inveigh, insult, tease, cajole, josh, laugh, clown about, and sing, led by butch girl. most of them have their faces painted the colors of the iranian flag and wear baggy and colorful clothes. the soldiers, by contract, look hassled and almost intimidated, constricted both by their uniforms and by the orders they reluctantly carry out.
the boundary between the inside and the outside of the pen is paramount and never gets crossed, even though it could easily be. but there is much more exuberance and freedom inside the pen than outside of it. yet the soldiers and the girls, kids of about the same age, bond. they get chatting about the farmer soldier’s life in the countryside, his work there. if i’m not mistaken (it’s been four months) they smoke together, the universal signifier of intimacy. the tension eases and slowly melts.
i can’t begin to gauge the class and various other political dynamics that are called into play through the interaction between the girls and the soldiers, but the gender politics of this film seem pretty damn subversive to me. not a mention is made of the unfemininity of the face-painted, cheering, smoking, shouting girls, but it seems to me that that’s one of the film’s greatest tensions. how can it not be? don’t most of the women after all wear head scarves and clothes meant to disguise their femininity? the raucousness of the girls and the awkward gentleness of the soldiers cannot but be a meaningful juxtaposition.
that fact that this takes place during the world cup suggests to me that, even as he strongly critiques his own government’s ridiculously repressive orthodoxy, panahi is also gesturing towards a western world that is abysmally ignorant of his country, his culture, and islam. i’d really like to teach this awesome movie.
Great post!!
i haven’t seen this yet, but want to join gio in telling everyone to watch the white balloon, which is one of the best films about childhood ever made, and also one of the best films about migrants ever made. the mirror is also pretty damned good.
and yes, football (real football) is the road to world peace. unless italy is playing. in which case, bring on the neutron bombs.
arnab,
there aren’t any migrants in the white balloon.
arnab,
we. won. the. world. cup. you. lost. the. pool.
oh gio, years of catenaccio have dulled your senses. i know all brown people seem the same to you, particularly when they’re muslim but: the young soldier that the girl bonds with is a migrant from a small town; the boy who helps her at the end is an afghan refugee.
wonderful result for italy today in the european championship. the first goal looked like an offside but it turns out it wasn’t. the second one was a thing of beauty, and the third wasn’t too shabby either.
Is Italy stunned?
It was offside. If that doesn’t count as being “accidentally” off the field of play nothing does.
Dino Risi is off the field of play. It was not accidental. But I don’t think it was a foul either.
It was Christian Panucci off the field and the FIFA rules are unclear.
On the one hand: “If an uninjured defender purposefully remains off the field in an attempt to place an attacker in an offside position, then that defender should also be deemed to be standing on the goal-line (on the field of play) when considering offside. Trickery of this nature circumvents the spirit of the offside Law” in which case it was offside because Panucci was not lying there on purpose (his back was to the play).
On the other: “A player leaving the field of play because of his momentum during play, is not deemed to have left without the Referee’s permission and can therefore re-enter without the Referee’s permission. In this instance, although the defender is off the field of play, (and until he returns to the field of play), he should be deemed to be standing on the goal-line (in the field of play) when considering offside” in which case it was a goal.
Oops, wrong blog. Great game though.
oh, jesus, soccer news. why don’t you concentrate on something significant like why Big Brown failed to take the Triple Crown.
Me like Turkish football.
It was fun while it lasted.