FILM_REVIEWS_This is not a film by Jafar Panahi
"This is not a film", in pure magrittean style, brilliantly reveals the spring of creation. This iranian non-film looks at us and shows us how fiction, far from being opposed to truth, is its means of revelation.
Jafar Panahi is awaiting the review of a monstrous sentence. He has been sentenced to 6 years in prison and 20 years disqualification from making films, precisely because he is a filmmaker. Confined to his house, and in order not to die of anguish - to wait is to die in life - he decides to go on, to escape. He calls his friend and colleague from previous shoots to film something inside his house, which, however, is not going to be a film.
An event on the set of the “white balloon”, a previous film, gives him a clue. The protagonist is a little girl who, in one scene, returns home alone by tram because her mother has not come to pick her up. In the middle of the filming, the girl plants herself: she takes off her clothes, she doesn't want to continue acting. She realises very well that the fiction she is acting out is not a lie, but that it has an impact on her being. Her determination stops the tram and she escapes from the filming scene, and there, in the street, for a few seconds the camera follows her. She ruins the script, the idea of the film fails, and yet a truth is revealed.
Jafar, in his house arrest, is looking for the door through which the girl slipped in. He wants to get out, to get off the bus. So it occurs to him that the ban on his sentence refers to making films, but it says nothing about reading scripts. He then goes on to explain the film he had in mind to make. As if the girl on the bus had grown up, this time, the protagonist of the new film, an 18-year-old girl, decides to study art in Tehran, but her family forbids her to do so. So the scene she chooses to show is the arrest inside her room and the visit of her paternal grandmother who plays the role of a prisoner. In the scene, the loneliness and desperation of her longing is palpitating.
Lacan showed us how the law is the reverse of desire, how it always tries to trap the power that desire unfolds. Panahi and his determined protagonist share this fate: they are alone, imprisoned, restrained so that their desire does not destabilise tradition and order.
If Jafar seeks to get out of the terror that is the protagonist of his life, as in a game of russian dolls, the incessant escape from the scene will be, paradoxically, the centre of the scene itself. Dissatisfied with his result, feeling that without the support of acting he cannot transmit, he leaves the stage again. Cut, cut, cut... The impotent director cannot cut, decide when something begins and ends, because he is not outside this film. So he continues with the mobile phone, and in a moment, he turns and films his camera, which in turn films him. The gaze begins to record itself, it becomes independent of the director's orders. The camera object has become the eye that records, the director subject is the object of the experiment. The truth is ready to be revealed.
But that's not all: Jafar escapes again. He says goodbye to his friend at the door, and then the doorbell rings. It is the brother of the caretaker of the building who is standing in for her, another fake character. He comes to collect the rubbish. The fake manager, clutching his mobile phone, decides to accompany him to all his neighbours' houses, and in the meantime, they have a conversation. Rubbish has everything to do with culture, it is with waste that desire operates. Art, far from constituting an ideal - with ideals one kills - is close to what fails. Rubbish is the raw material of desire.
This "non-film", in its incessant flight of scenes, gives form to this yearning for truth from the genuine drive to escape reality. That is why the freedom that encloses creation, a freedom that is always a forced choice, will tirelessly find ways to make itself expressed. They will never be able to enclose the sea.
Irene Domínguez
https://colochosblog.wordpress.com/2020/04/29/esto-no-es-una-pelicula-de-jafar-panahi/