# Dayereh (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    THE CIRCLE (Dayereh)

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     Winstar Films
     Director: Jafar Panahi
     Writer:  Kambuzia Partovi
     Cast:Maryiam Palvin Almani, Nargess Mamizadeh,
    Fereshteh Sadr Orfani, Monir Arab, Elham Saboktakin,
    Fatemen Naghavi, Mojgan Faramarzi

Joan Baez sang a mournful song during the 1960s that went like this: "Hard is the fortune of all womankind/ She's always controlled, she's always confined/ Controlled by her parents until she's a wife/ A slave to her husband all the rest of her life." Was she talking about the typical American woman? Could be, but if so that's her interpretation. Joan should see what a woman's life is like in Iran today. Since 1979 when the Ayatollah took the reins of power forcibly away from the Shah, Iran became a man's world. Women were restricted not only by the lifeless clothing they had to wear including the chador which covered them over garments that already needed to hide every hair on their head but more by a full range of allegedly Koranic restrictions that forbade them to smoke in public, to travel from city to city unless accompanied by their husbands or male relatives or unless they were in possession of the proper student or other id's.

But forget about mere words. No-one has done a better job than Jafar Panahi, utilizing a screenplay based on his own ideas from the pen of Kambozia Partovi, in portraying a narrow world that women face in Tehran nowadays, where religious police patrol the streets looking for violations of medieval rules, even entrapping people into violating laws against prostitution.

Panahi's "The Circle," which gets its name from the circuitous path traveled by women who simply cannot break loose, cannot make progress, but go round and round in much the way that the Greek figure Sisyphus kept rolling a stone up a hill only to have the marker come tumbling down once again. Unlike American movies like Jonathan Kaplan's "Brokedown Palace" (depicting the absurd harshness of the police in Thailand who entrap Alice and Darlene on a trumped-up drug charge), "The Circle," or "Dayereh" as Panahi's film is called in Farsi, uses no score and makes frequent takes with a handheld camera as though following the Dogme 95 style. In other words, "The Circle" comes across without Hollywood histrionics but rather as would a docudrama in its description of the plight of a handful of unfortunate females in Iran's benighted capital.

Panahi frames the film by showing a section of a door opening and closing on a woman who beseeches an official for information, and to carry the metaphor of the title further even portrays much of the architecture of the city in circular form. The story opens on a woman screaming from the pain of childbirth (Solmaz Gholami) whose elderly mother displays a distraught expression. An ultrasound test had predicted that the newborn would be a boy but when a girl turns up, Solmaz fears that her in-laws would insist on a divorce. (One could scarcely accept the idea that this extreme reaction is typical throughout the country, or every woman giving birth to a little girl would be a single mother!) The most frantic scene of the film focusses on three young women who had just been granted temporary leave from prison. When one is arrested, the other two, Arezou (Maryiam Parvin Almani) and her buddy Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) plan to flee by bus to a rural area of the state where they believe they can find safety from the police. The most poignant vista involves Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani), who had escaped from jail after her husband was executed, and now, four months pregnant, she begs a friend who works in the local hospital to get her an abortion. No such luck. To get such a procedure requires the husband's permission and, if no husband is available, the father and father-in-law must consent. (To be honest, I was surprised that abortion is even legal in Iran, requiring merely the acquiescence of the husband!)

Because Panahi does not coddle us with a commercial, American-style of filmmaking, "The Circle" will depend for success on an arthouse audience with the patience to endure and even thrive on Panahi's extended looks at each of the women. He can hold his camera on a face for a solid minute, giving the viewer the chance to absorb the inner torment of these ill-fated people. The one person who might be most accepting of her jail sentence would be Mojgan (Mojgan Faramarzi), who could pass for a hooker anywhere. She does not try to hide her profession and at one point justifies her choice of profession: "How else do I pay my bills, honey?"

Though critical of the Iranian political system, "The Circle" might conceivably have passed the censorship boards in that country if only because the apparatchiks there might see nothing wrong with the way these women are treated. The reality, though, is that Panahi succeeded in getting a permit to make the picture only when his country's directors' guild interceded with the government for him. The authorities were even willing to show the movie in Iran if the director would cut the final eighteen minutes (which he did not). What happened then was that after 400 students in his country saw the film at a private screening, it was shipped to Venice where it wowed the folks at a festival there and wound up in last year's New York Film Festival as well. Except for the poignancy shared by Panahi's other works, his third film is most unlike his naive but effective "The White Balloon," a story about a little girl who runs into an assortment of people while buying a goldfish. When you realize that women in Afghanistan have it even worse than the fair sex in Iran, you get to wonder about the rationality of the civilized mind.

Not Rated. Running time: 91 minutes. (C) 2001 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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