3 Faces

Iran­ian writer/​director Jafar Panahi obvi­ous­ly isn’t a man to let a 20-year state sanc­tioned film­mak­ing ban cramp his style. This lat­est offer­ing is the fourth fea­ture he’s turned out under legal restric­tions imposed when he was found guilty of ​‘pro­pa­gan­da against the Islam­ic Republic’.

Still, it’s clear from the films them­selves that he’s now on a slight­ly longer leash: where 2011’s This Is Not a Film and 2013’s Closed Cur­tain were per­son­al reflec­tions on liv­ing under house arrest, shoot­ing 2015’s Taxi Tehran in and around a cab nego­ti­at­ing the bustling cap­i­tal showed a cer­tain free­dom of move­ment, and 3 Faces now takes the form of an extend­ed road trip to the far north west.

With its broad­er geo­graph­i­cal can­vas, 3 Faces is in many ways the most out­ward-look­ing of those recent films, focus­ing strong­ly on the right of women to seek act­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties despite dis­ap­proval from con­ser­v­a­tive fam­i­ly mem­bers. That con­flict is so strong that the whole film opens with mobile phone footage of a young woman who’s about to kill her­self because her par­ents won’t let her fol­low her dreams.

The images were sent to one of Iran’s most famous actress­es, Behnaz Jafari, who has asked Panahi to dri­ve her to the girl’s home vil­lage (point­ed­ly men­tioned in the clip) and dis­cov­er whether the whole ruse is a cry for help, or she has actu­al­ly done the fatal deed. Jafari, with strik­ing red hair peek­ing out from under her scarf, is a reg­u­lar on Iran­ian TV screens and hence recog­nised every­where she goes, though she has also worked in film with the likes of Abbas Kiarosta­mi and Sami­ra Makhmalbaf.

As the two wind up in the remote moun­tains, Jafari at first seems some­what aggra­vat­ed to have left a shoot because of some self-drama­tis­ing teen, but even­tu­al­ly the bit­ter irony that the vil­lagers treat her like roy­al­ty while assum­ing that the local lass’s ambi­tions to take up act­ing will doubt­less end up in pros­ti­tu­tion kicks in.

Effec­tive as a open­ing teas­er, the sui­cide sce­nario only dra­mat­i­cal­ly sus­tains the film so far, and when the ball does final­ly drop, 3 Faces there­after turns into some­thing of an obser­va­tion­al doc as the filmy types try hard not to patro­n­ise the rough-hewn yokels with their deep-set tra­di­tion­al ways.

It’s watch­able enough, and if Panahi’s polit­i­cal mes­sage about the need to ques­tion sex­ist oppres­sion per­pe­trat­ed unthink­ing­ly in the name of reli­gion hits the tar­get, his some­what func­tion­al style has lit­tle of the mys­tery or poet­ry that his late men­tor Kiarosta­mi showed in rur­al-set films such as 1997’s Taste of Cher­ry and 1999’s The Wind Will Car­ry Us.

That said, while the film’s ten­den­cy to mean­der does it few favours, there’s a cer­tain defi­ance which strikes a nerve when we get to the third face hint­ed at by the title – here liv­ing as a vir­tu­al out­cast is a star actress from pre-Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion days. Panahi respects her wish to remain off-screen, which only high­lights her cur­rent sta­tus as a non-per­son, but even so the infer­ence that she has found a life for her­self as painter and poet offers an affir­ma­tive indi­ca­tion that life goes on… even with­out state approval.