My two favorite things about this movie:
(1) The triumph of joy. At the end, the celebration consumes all worries, fears, repression. The Persian national anthem is playing; as Panahi notes, it's a song redolent of Persia's renaissance, its golden days before the Islamic invasion. (The Iranian author Marjane Satrapi also observes how the playing of this long-banished song stirs the people — not to nationalism, but to humanism).
(2) The intelligent mixing and balancing of issues and individuals. I think Panahi ran a high risk as he used the documentary style of making a purely "political" film, an "issue" film, but it went so much deeper than that. The rural soldier (what a great character) yells at one of the women, "Don't you know the difference between men and women?" And the question just hangs throughout the movie, dumb and irrelevant.
What did you like most about the movie?
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The documentary style absolved him of having to embellish or dramatize a storyline to drive a point home. I started this off cringing -- would we have a you-go-girl "Bend It Like Beckham" moment or some other emotionally exploitative scene to tell us what to think? It's like what you said about the dumb, unanswered comment left hanging in the air -- the absurdity of the situation told the story itself. (I like how the women couldn't be present in the stadium because of profanity, and the soldiers let it fly in front of them like it was commonplace.) The director lined up values that didn't add up, yet spared us the trouble of an arbitrator whose job was to solve or pass judgment on those anomalies for the audience.
My favorite parts were the well-played characters: the woman who was the most outspoken and the woman who wore the uniform.
"The director lined up values that didn't add up, yet spared us the trouble of an arbitrator whose job was to solve or pass judgment on those anomalies for the audience."
Excellent point, cl. I think you've just hit on why this is considered a comedy: the simple presentation of numbers that don't add up and letting the viewer do the wacky math.
Yeah, I loved the one girl's incessant questioning of the soldier and his lame attempts to make sense of the rules. The cursing was funny. I kept waiting for someone to point out that they were hearing cursing even while in custody.
I kept waiting for someone to point out that they were hearing cursing even while in custody.
How about the fact that the women themselves were cursing? (At least one of them.)
Right. It made the rationale for banning women completely ridiculous.
I just saw a news story that said Ahmadinejad last year wanted to allow women into soccer matches because having women out in public "promotes chastity." But then Ayatollah Khamenei vetoed the measure because women shouldn't be looking at strange men's bodies. So they've expanded their reasoning beyond just the profanity.
You know what else was great about the ending? The girls didn't slink off, frightened, into the crowd. They marched through it proudly, brandishing fireworks. Their spirit still hadn't been broken.
That was great. And the men dropped their fear of getting in trouble. They had been frantic about ONE prisoner missing. Now they all would be missing! And it didn't matter. Dancing in the street was all that mattered.
(That's Ani Difranco's main antidote for social ills: More joy, less shame.)
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