No Bears

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Venice, Jafar Panahi’s latest drama showcases his most fluid filmmaking in twelve years.

No filmmaker alive today is more valiant than Jafar Panahi. Targeted for more than a decade by the Iranian government for being too outspoken, the past twelve years have seen him barred from leaving the country and from making films and he is currently serving a fresh sentence for supporting protests. Yet throughout this time he has defied the authorities by continuing to film and No Bears is the fifth full-length feature that he has made in these circumstances (the first of these undertaken in 2011 was a kind of video diary and was given a title coined with the ban in mind, This Is Not a Film).

The films made by Panahi in these conditions have won prizes but have often been works that felt confined due to the circumstances in which they were made. No Bears, however, is rather different having been filmed away from Tehran and having as its main location the village of Jabbar close to Iran's border with Turkey. This rural setting has enabled Panahi to make an outdoor work which is less constricted and which, even if it contains limited shots of road journeys, often reminds one of the films of the great Abbas Kiarostami to whom Panahi was once an assistant.

IMDb’s tag-line summary for No Bears describes it as two parallel love stories and, indeed, it is not wrong to say that. At the outset we encounter a waitress named Zara (Mina Kavani) whose companion, Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei), has obtained a passport for her but not for himself and later another couple, the villagers Gozal (Darya Alei) and Solduz (Amir Davari), find themselves forced into secrecy. Local tradition is such that Gozal cannot follow her heart unless she attempts to run away with Solduz because from birth she has been expected to marry another (Javad Siyahi) who is determined to assert his right. However, the link between these two situations is provided by yet a third thread which is central to the film.

In these later, highly personal works Jafar Panahi has regularly appeared as a version of himself (the stories told may have a fictional dimension but contain a strong autobiographical element too). Thus, in No Bears he appears as a filmmaker who is said to have been banned from leaving Iran and is visiting this village near the border and later on he is even on one occasion addressed as ‘Mr Panahi’. Nevertheless, we are asked to believe in this character as a man whose tendency to take photographs puts him in a dilemma when he is accused of refusing to hand over an image that he has of Solduz with Gozal. Pressure is applied because the photograph would compromise the lovers and help the claims of Soduz’s rival. Furthermore, we are made aware that, although directing from a distance, this filmmaker is in fact creating with the help of an assistant director (Reza Heydari) a film version of the situation in which Zara and Bakhtiar find themselves.

In a sense this all comes together to make No Bears a rich film, but the mix feels less than wholly satisfactory. First, the difficult circumstances in which both couples find themselves seem to carry tragic weight but, partly because of the extent to which the reality of Panahi’s his own life is echoed in his character, the footage showing the filmmaker seems to take screen centre and thus to play down the impact of what happens to the two wholly fictional couples. Secondly, the linking up of the three stories is done in a way that raises questions about whether or not the actions of the filmmaker render him responsible for adding to the danger in which the couples find themselves. What we are meant to make of this is open to doubt.

No Bears is certainly very original but given the way in which it is revealed to be in part a film about filmmaking it can sometimes feel a bit precious. More importantly, it ultimately carries less weight than one would have hoped due to the difficulty in finding the right balance between its three central threads. Nevertheless, it is to Panahi’s credit that he made it at all and, when compared with its four immediate predecessors, it is No Bears that emerges as the work which most enables one to rejoice in Panahi’s skills as a filmmaker – this film has air to breathe and, for all Panahi’s lack of personal freedom, it frees his directorial skills.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Cast: Jafar Panahi, Mina Kavani, Bakhtiar Panjeei, Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Vahid Mobaseri, Narjes Delaram, Darya Alei, Amir Davari, Javad Siyahi, Sinan Yusufoglu, Yousef Soleymani.

Dir Jafar Panahi, Pro Jafar Panahi, Screenplay Jafar Panahi, Ph Amin Jafari, Pro Des Babak Jajaie Tabrizi, Ed Amir Etminan, Costumes Leyla Siyani.

JP Production-Picturehouse Entertainment.
107 mins. Iran. 2022. UK Rel: 11 November 2022. Cert. 12A.