Jafar Panahi has in a pretty short time, and to some extent through no fault of his own, become one of the most important directors in the world. For many years, he was a bit in the shadow of his countryman Abbas Kiarostami, making fine and realistic films on the troubles of the Iranians. Films like The Mirror toyed with a meta-layer, but mainly, Panahi made subtle but powerful social realism, with films like The Circle and Crimson Gold being much more explicitly political than Kiarostami's more poetic ouvre. After the failed 'Green Revolution' in Iran in 2009, the regime under Ahmadinejad tightened it's grip on it's artists, and while Kiarostami afterwards went abroad and made his recent films in Italy and Japan, Panahi was thrown in house arrest and hit with a 20 year ban on film-making. Therefore, it was a powerful gesture when in 2011 his film This is Not a Film was smuggled into Cannes on a USB-stick hidden in a pastry. On top of that, the film was pretty much a masterpiece, a portrait of Panahi himself while he waited in his appartment for the final ruling in the case against him, and tried to uphold his identity as a creating film-artist.
One important thing: For such a minimal production, this is an incredibly beautiful film.
Closed Curtain is in some ways the diametrically opposed film to This Is Not a Film. Where that film was presented like a documentary, and filmed minimalistically on a handheld camera, Closed Curtain is demonstratively a construction, filmicly and narratively. The film opens patiently, with a long shot taken out of the window from a villa at the Caspian Sea. We follow the main character, an unnamed writer, as he drives up to the villa in a taxi, walks from the taxi to the house, opens the door outside the frame of the window, goes back to the taxi to pay the driver, and walks back into the house, where he closes the curtains.Only then does the camera leave the window, and follows the man to his bag, where we find the reason he has fled for the villa: He has smuggled a dog with him in his bag, as dogs has been outlawed by the regime. The whole first part of the film is only the man and his dog - dog-lovers will love this film! - in a villa with heavy, black curtains for all windows, and it is filmed in steady, well-composed shots. The camera turns around, but never moves. But then the film receives the first of many shocks: The writer suddenly discovers that a young couple has intruded into the villa, and the film is suddenly handheld and shaky. The young man quickly leaves, but the woman stays behind, and we find out she is depressive and suicidal. It could seem as if the camera has become unstable due to the young woman, but even after she's dissapeared without a trace, the style stays shaken. Only after a series of shocks, where the woman reapears in impossible ways, tear down the curtains, and the director Jafar Panahi himself all of a sudden steps into the film from an alcove, does the film find a calmness again: Panahi's calmness. The rest of the film is torn between a plane where Panahi is in the villa, and a plane where the writer and the young woman is in the villa, and the two planes are filmed in different ways. I won't reveal all the surprising twists from the last half-hour, I was exhausted and couldn't really remember them all clearly. The film got a Silver Bear for Best Script at Berlin last year, and it really is an amazingly constructed film.
But most of all it's an extraordinary brave film. Where This Is Not a Film tried to circumvent the ban from the regime, by claiming that it wasn't a film, and that anyway it couldn't be proved that Panahi was the one making it, Closed Curtain is an insistent roar against the rules. Thereby, the film is an attack, not just on censorship, but on the earlier reaction of Panahi himself. While the film from 2011 insinuated that Panahi was holding a camera, but never presented any conclusive proof, in Closed Curtain he demonstratively holds a camera in his hand in one of the best meta-twists of the film: In an earlier scene, the writer has told a camera-phone how he behaved in an even earlier scene in the film, and when Panahi finds that film on his iPhone, the camera has obviously caught himself filming the scene we saw earlier (yeah, it's complicated...) And where TINAF had a melancholic ending, with Panahi being left behind at the entrance of his apartment complex, because he couldn't move outside, CC on the other hand ends with him leaving the depressive and doubting woman behind, and driving away with the creating writer, thereby openly breaking his housearrest. It's a confusing, layered and mindbogglingly strong film, which enriches and is in turn itself enriched, through the interplay with the earlier film. In my opinion, Panahi is so far the most important director of the decade, not just as a political martyr, or because his films are so brave and weighty, but because these two film together are better than what any other director has acomlished these last five years.
