No Bears – first-look review

Mere weeks sep­a­rate the Venice Film Festival’s world pre­mière of Jafar Panahi’s newest film No Bears from his lat­est arrest over accu­sa­tions of pro­pa­gan­da against the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment. The film­mak­er – first impris­oned in 2010 on the same charges – has been banned from mak­ing movies, writ­ing screen­plays, and speak­ing with any Iran­ian or for­eign media for the last 10 years, with anoth­er 10 still ous­tand­ing on his sen­tence. This has not stopped the direc­tor, and in the decade since his first arrest, he has pro­duced a whop­ping five fea­tures, includ­ing the sem­i­nal This Is Not a Film (2011) and Gold­en Bear-win­ning Taxi Tehran (2015). 

Panahi’s lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal entrap­ment feeds into the meta­tex­tu­al­i­ty of No Bears. Here, the film­mak­er plays him­self, but all else around him is a mix­ture of fact and fic­tion, with two sets of lovers placed against the polit­i­cal struc­tures that have forced the Iran­ian mas­ter into a state­less exile. The first pair com­pris­es a con­tem­po­rary Romeo and Juli­et kept apart by the out­dat­ed rit­u­als of the small com­mu­ni­ty that acts as the director’s refuge; the sec­ond is a pair of long-term part­ners whose rela­tion­ship runs par­al­lel to their fight against Iran’s author­i­tar­i­an régime.

Dias­po­ra to Panahi is con­veyed by this very sense of state­less­ness. ​“He feels trapped, with no future, no free­dom and no job”, Panahi tells his fic­tion­al assis­tant direc­tor (played by his real-life sound design­er Reza Hey­dari) a sim­ply put yet beau­ti­ful­ly lay­ered encap­su­la­tion of this par­tic­u­lar kind of claus­tro­pho­bic despair. The ache of dias­po­ra is trans­lat­ed through the dichoto­my of no longer bask­ing in the sense of belong­ing once pro­vid­ed by home while know­ing no place will ever be able to sup­plant it, dis­place­ment cre­at­ing a gap­ing hole that grows big­ger with every mer­ci­less blown thrown by a social appa­ra­tus that acts as pun­ish­er when it was designed to serve as custodian. 

No Bears often echoes Abbas Kiarostami’s for­lorn Taste of Cher­ry, with a car reck­less­ly dri­ving through the arid lands of the Iran­ian desert to car­ry out a nihilis­tic desire to flirt with self-destruc­tion. Yet, Panahi – who start­ed his career under Kiarostami’s wing – bypass­es the over­bear­ing melan­cho­lia often employed by his men­tor in favour of once again tap­ping into the wel­come use of humour that per­me­ates most of his films. Life, as they say, goes on, and No Bears observes peo­ple toil­ing away at exist­ing while Panahi wres­tles with the exis­ten­tial, this jux­ta­po­si­tion pro­vid­ing the clev­er­ly timed com­ic relief that aids his wit­ty social commentary. 

There are no bears in No Bears, the ani­mal stand­ing for the way in which con­trol is often estab­lished in soci­ety through the per­pet­u­a­tion of machi­avel­lian myths. ​“Sto­ries are made up to scare us. Our fear empow­ers oth­ers”, a man tense­ly whis­pers to Panahi as they near the heav­i­ly-policed Iran­ian bor­ders. The same ground that once bore the stur­dy foun­da­tion of a lov­ing home now stands eter­nal­ly scarred by the sear­ing cuts of imag­i­nary lines, an irrepara­ble fis­sure that – in Panahi’s heart­felt visu­al diary – cru­el­ly sev­ers the frail umbil­i­cal cord to the motherland.