As Iranian women rise up against their misogynist bullies, this is a good time to watch Jafar Panahi’s latest film, set in a village whose inhabitants are encouraged to be scared of supposed “bears” roaming the countryside – just as the Iranian people are supposed to be afraid of their morality police. No Bears is a complex, mysterious metafiction about the anguish of Iran and the artist working within Iran. Its creator, film-maker and democracy campaigner Panahi, has recently been sentenced to six years in jail after long periods of house arrest since a bogus propaganda charge in 2011.
Panahi plays “Jafar Panahi”, a film director who is forbidden to make films or leave the country. So his new movie is shooting in a small Turkish town just over the border; it stars an Iranian couple, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjei) and Zara (Mina Khosravani), based on their own actual ordeal in trying to escape Iran for good. Panahi has delegated the hands-on direction to his assistant Reza (Reza Heydari), and he is watching the filming via Skype. He could easily do this from Tehran, but due to a compulsion to be close to the action (and to freedom), Panahi is doing this from a rented room in a tiny Iranian village just a few miles the other side of the border. The villagers themselves have accepted his cover story that he is there to photograph local customs, including a forthcoming wedding.
A double calamity hits. The young village woman about to undergo the arranged-marriage ceremony is in love with someone else and is convinced that Panahi has captured one of their secret meetings with his camera, a rumour which escalates to such a degree that a deputation of village elders confronts Panahi and demands to confiscate this scandalous photograph. (The concept of the digital file is evidently beyond them.) Panahi is convinced that he has taken no such photograph, at least not deliberately, and this nightmare, like something from Antonioni’s Blow Up, has a queasy parallel with his own life: he is filming when he is forbidden to film and now he has photographed something which he is forbidden to photograph.
Worse still befalls him. His film’s female lead Zara has been assuming that however real-seeming, the movie is a scripted drama, and that the storyline about a people-smuggler stealing tourists’ UK and EU passports for them is a mere fiction. But Panahi and Bekhtiar are keeping something from her.
No Bears taps into an Iranian movie-making strategy which has been apparent for decades: the need to evade censorship with complexity and ambiguity in tackling contemporary political issues. Rural and remote settings help with this indirection. Yet the film-within-a-film trope reflects on how much it is possible or desirable to capture real people with a camera, and No Bears has obvious similarities to movies such as Through the Olive Trees and The Wind Will Carry Usby the late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, to whom Panahi was once assistant.
There is a bracing severity and intelligence and moral seriousness to No Bears, though just occasionally I wondered if this meta-fiction is a bit emotionally obtuse and if Panahi could say something as clear and punchy as the title itself: no bears, no to superstition, no to misogyny, no to theocratic cruelty and tyranny. But maybe that qualification is itself obtuse. Like Panahi’s recent films This Is Not a Film and Taxi Tehran, this is powerful because of its control, subtlety and diplomatic finesse.
• No Bears is released on 11 November in cinemas.
