Directed during the conditional freedom of the filmmaker, who is serving a sentence of six years in prison in Tehran, the film tells the condition of persecuted artists and the difficult choice between leaving and staying.
by Mathieu Macheret
The last feature film by Iranian Jafar Panahi, produced in parole, comes out at a time when the filmmaker has been serving, since July 11, a six-year sentence in Evin prison in Tehran. A serious fire started there on October 15, echoing the troubles and uprisings that the country crosses. Thus receiving news from the artist behind bars, thanks to the setback that defines the rhythm of the cinema (opposed in this at the vintage of the news), constitutes a formidable and overwhelming foot of the nose to the authorities, which, until the end , will be relentless to silence it, without fulfilling it completely.
Besides, none bear, rewarded with a special jury prize at the Venice Mostra, specifically evokes the condition of persecuted artists and, at the same time, their inability to do something other than their profession. A first -hand testimony, and therefore invaluable, but which the director delivers in his own way: Retlor, through a story where fiction and reality play cat and mouse.
The first scene sets the tone, which opens onto a shopping street, before the characters, a tormented couple, are addressed directly to the camera. It is in fact a false track, a film in the film, that the real protagonist, Jafar Panahi in his own role, realizes at a distance, hidden in a small village of Iranian Kurdistan, border with Turkey. He orchestrates the sockets through the screen of his laptop, but the connection is bad, and here he is going out or going up on the roof of his house to find a better one. Exactly as did the hero of the wind will take us (1999), of his master Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016), with his mobile phone.
incriminated images
This filming story adds a small village drama, treated first in a light tone, then more and more creaky, oppressive. Housed by a man of extreme affability, the underground filmmaker, always equipped with his camera, is soon confronted with the embarrassment that his presence on the spot arouses (which is not imagined without political reasons), by the intrigue that is tied around his person.
A child indeed reports to have surprised him photographing a future bride in the company of a boy other than his fiancé, and therefore in the flagrant contravention of custom. Exercising on the visitor an increasingly insistent pressure, the community requires him that he gives up his storage card, where the images incriminated are. He opposes them a refusal: if these images exist, what could they prove?
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