This is my good friend Cara’s contribution to the Iranian Film Blogathon. She’s an incredible writer, with a couple of novels in the pipeline (we are both ambitious writers, we support each other), as well as a Sylvia Plath fanatic – well, one of the things we share is that when we love something, or become obsessed with something, we go all out. We work our obsessions as though it is our JOB. I sent her a copy of Offside a couple of weeks ago – I just knew she’d love it – and here is what she wrote. I am so moved. Thank you for participating, friend.
Thank you, Sheila, for giving me the opportunity to write about Offside, a film directed by Jafar Panahi. I’m not a film critic, much less a connoisseur of Iranian film, but I think that is okay. The film doesn’t feel like an esoteric art house “important” film where one must be an expert to comment on it – it feels a lot like Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink– a young rebellion movie. I think that’s part of the seduction – it is approachable, and feels like an ordinary film from middle class life in Tehran.
Offside is the story of five girls who want to see the Iran-Bahrain soccer game at the stadium. It’s an important game – it will determine if Iran is going to the 2006 World Cup. But girls are not allowed to attend the games. The sexes are very much divided – though there are exceptions which I’ll get to in a moment. So what’s a girl to do?
Our five ladies – who do not know each other – dress up as boys. Not very successfully, however, since they’re all caught as they try to enter the game and are sent to a small prisoner area to wait out the game. Occasionally, one of the other soldiers will report on the game, and the girls will come alive. Their enthusiasm for the game reminded me of Twilight tweens at the mall, though they’re a little older than those American girls. The community of like-mindeds gives some degree of gravity to their obsession and it is fun to watch any group become intense about their passions, arguing over the best players, acting out little bits of the game.
While corralled outside the stadium, where they can hear the crowds cheering, the girls manage to get the guard, an earnest soldier who only wants to get through his duty and back to his cattle, to discuss some of the hypocrisy in the fact that they can’t go inside. Some Japanese women were permitted inside, and so were some Bahrain women too. But because these are Iranian women… well, the rules are different, that’s all.
One girl needs to use the restroom, and a soldier reluctantly agrees to escort her to the bathroom. There is no women’s room, so she must go to the men’s room. The soldier tries to keep out other men while she’s using the facilities, but you can see, in this rowdy crowd, how dangerous it truly is for her to be there. The boys seem wild, and they far outnumber the women. I found myself at one point actually thinking, well she well and truly doesn’t belong there.
And I was right. Iran is just not set up for women. This isn’t a shocker, but it’s surprising when you see how utterly comprehensive that exclusion really is. In one scene, a grandfather tries to hit the friend of his granddaughter who has come to the game and is somewhere in the crowds. The soldier grabs his arm and says, “You don’t hit women!”
But you know, if the soldier hadn’t been there, you really could. There would have been no societal repercussions for striking a young girl. Girls just don’t really matter in the culture and Panahi has a cold, objective eye on this fact.
A few notes about the filmmaking itself:
I noticed that during the daylight hours of the movie, when the girls are still prisoner, I was eye-level with them. The men were shot from a slightly upward angle. I felt like I was looking up at them, seeing their shoulders and faces, whereas with the girls, I would have been perfectly eye-level. Later, after dark, the camera is suddenly over the girl’s heads. The men are eye-level. It’s a jarring change.
I also noticed that there is a lot of movement in this movie. From the first scene until the very last, something is moving. Even in scenes where the characters are still, the background is moving (such as cars driving in the highway behind the stadium). The graffiti on the bathroom walls looks like it is moving too. There is a sense of life in this movie, that Iran is a place just like your own hometown, moving, bustling, living. But it isn’t Houston or Providence or Tulsa. The fact that I am an American watching this movie makes it a “lesson” about the cultural differences – but it’s actually more than that. It’s an entertaining movie about national pride, and the rituals and games that bind us all together.
Thank you, again, Sheila, for opening my horizons just a little bit by suggesting this movie.
Cara – you rock my world with this. Thank you. It was so cool to remember the film through your experience of it. Your observations are so specific.
// I found myself at one point actually thinking, well she well and truly doesn’t belong there. //
That is chilling. How you so quickly internalized that world – and it’s like you suddenly think: “Well, it really would be so much easier if the girls just stayed home and watched the game on TV – why can’t they just do that??”
Panahi always said (he has daughters himself) that he thought the situation was more ridiculous than anything else. He wanted to make a comedic film about a serious issue. I really think he has done that – but that one comment from you really shows how well he has communicated that world to us, out here in the West – that we “get it” to such a degree that you would have such a thought, so foreign.
Thank you again for taking this on. I am so happy you saw the film and so happy you reviewed it. Great job.
You nailed it – I actually felt frustrated with the girls during the bathroom scene, thinking sheesh, you couldn’t just watch this on tv at home?
Also I left out two things I should have included because I keep thinking about them, so here they are.
1. The one glimpse of the soccer game comes 45 minutes into the movie, and when I saw it, I felt actual elation. Like, oh there it is! The soccer game! This, coming from a girl who rolls her eyes at the very mention of Beckham.
2. The fact that the girls arrived separately sort of thrills me. The very first scene when the girl is on the bus, and she’s trying hard not to be noticed, struck me as very poignant. She’s so obviously a girl. I saw her as prey on that bus. It, again, made me feel frustrated with her. Why are you endangering yourself? Get back at home in your chador where you belong! This is very dangerous, scary thinking. Later, when the one girl is wearing a chador, I felt like she would be punished less. She was conforming, good girl.
Thank you so much for asking me to participate. I really feel like the pleasure was all mine.
// This, coming from a girl who rolls her eyes at the very mention of Beckham. //
hahahahaha Awesome. Soccer is important to THEM and you totally clicked in with that.
That girl who put on the chador, with the colors of Iran painted on her face, was my favorite, although I love them all. She was so expressive. During the scene in the van at the end, as things hit a crucial moment in the soccer game, she literally closes her eyes and prays. For a long long time. It made me laugh out loud. I’m a Red Sox fan. I know exactly what she was going through!
//I’m a Red Sox fan. I know exactly what she was going through!//
Hahahah! I always love your Red Sox comments.
I watched Offside when it first came out in 2006 and thought, “Well. This is exactly like October 27, 2004” and if I had not been allowed to watch the game, you can bet I would have dressed up like a boy and tried to gate-crash.
I also love how many allies they find in the men along the way. The boys on the bus – that one boy who says to his friend, “Don’t mess up her chances. Let her try to get in.” And the soldier who ends up hanging out the window of the Vice Squad van fiddling with the antenna – because, dammit, he wants to hear the game too.
And – my favorite – the boy with the green flag wrapped around his head who nudges against the crowd of boys in the bathroom and gestures at the girl to let her fly by past him. He’s like, “Whatever, girl, go to it – “
Oh yes, the girls did have allies with the boys, though they are the ones the girls are supposedly being protected from. I thought that was amusing. The men are the supreme in Iran, but also, as portrayed in the movie and through-out the Muslim world, they’re so base that they can’t control their animal instincts. It’s a weird conflict. I don’t know how to reconcile those two factors.
The guard who fixes the antenna, I really liked. He was so earnest about everything.
I was surprised that the girl who went to the bathroom came back. She said she did it so the soldier wouldn’t get in trouble. But I had a hard time buying that. She’d dressed up like a boy to go to the game, she gets her chance, and is so easily swayed to return to the captors? Hm. Maybe I missed something there.
My thoughts on the return? She realized there were other people who had to answer for her sneaking off. A very mature decision to notice that her neck wasn’t the only one on the line there, the soldier and his cows and his mother all mattered too.
Right, like: “oooh boys are so scary, they swear, and stuff …” Meanwhile, many of them are just soccer fans, good boys going to a game on a Saturday – they all have mothers/sisters/grandmothers they respect … Whatever, let the girls try to get in if they want to, no skin off my nose.
I think what happens is … it really isn’t Men who are the enemy. It is the State. That guard was really in over his head with his duties – a country boy baffled by these crazy urban female hooligans – and I think she sensed how much trouble he would be in – and that he really wasn’t a bad guy, even though he was in charge of their imprisonment. I love how none of them were intimidated by him – he yells at them to settle down, and they all just start giggling at how upset he was.
While things are obviously worse for women, in terms of their freedom of movement, EVERYONE suffers under that oppression. And at the end of the day, what bonds everyone together is soccer.
But one of Panahi’s points (and most Iranian filmmakers) is that the oppression of women affects men, too. It separates them unnecessarily. I think on the ground it is very different – Iranians are savvy modern-minded people – you can see that clearly in their protests and journalism and technological prowess. Girls and boys are texting each other flirtatiously (probably “sexting” each other, too!) just like they are here – and the regime is frantically trying to stop all of that. But they cannot. Cat’s out of the bag. Can’t stop progress. Everyone has an illegal satellite dish, everyone has a blog page (I read some statistic somewhere once that Iran has the most individual blogs per population-number of any country on the planet), everyone has a cell phone. These are private communications unheard of even 10 years ago and it has changed the game entirely.
Also, yeah, it was so funny how the main guard has the privilege and status of his gender – but he is seriously no match for those 5 rambunctious girls. And he finally just caves and admits that. “Oh, fuck it, let’s try to get the game on the radio.”
How about the crazy boy in the Vice Squad van with the firecrackers? I loved him, too. What a nob.
Yes! Thank you! You distilled a bunch of disparate thoughts that I had into a nice cohesive package.
I loved Panahi’s “handling” of the women. I mean he didn’t condescend, he didn’t try to make them big heroes, it just felt like a very objective movie. The fact that he didn’t have to use over-the-top metaphors and just let the girls speak for themselves really made the movie much more powerful than if it had been a feminist screed about “women’s rights” or whatever. He clearly respects women, he didn’t feel the need to make them anything other than what they naturally are.
I’m a little bit in love with him after this movie, for exactly that reason.
I’ve been thinking about him all day, and I wish we could write a movie ending for him – that he’d be set free, Iran would realize the futility of its authoritarian government, and the metaphorical Wall would come down, freeing millions of Iranians. And we’d all live happily ever after.
Cara – agreed. If you want to check out more of his films – I’d say rent The Circle. That (along with Offside) has been his biggest hit – at least internationally – a searing brutal movie about 5 or 6 women who have all just been released from pirson and how they survive on the streets of Tehran. It doesn’t have the joie de vivre of Offside – but it’s a fantastic film. Not that I condone his imprisonment, but you can see why he is so feared. He pulls no punches.
He has been married for years, he has daughters, he thinks it is outrageous that his 10 year old girl can’t go to a soccer game. How ridiculous. Offside came about because he was at a soccer game one day in Tehran at the very stadium where he would eventually film the movie, and his 10 year old daughter, who had wanted to go but was turned away at the gate, suddenly was seen strolling down the steps to sit beside him. He had no idea how she got in. She is a tiny little girl, but he was in awe of her trickiness – He asked his daughter, “How did you get in??” Her response? A blase “There is always a way, Dad.”
That was the germ for Offside.
And I totally agree: his treatment of women is very egalitarian and unsentimental. I love when the guard says something like, “But you can’t go in! Men swear!” and the head-girl, the real tomboy, exclaims, ‘BULL SHIT.”
hahahaha
Pretty radical stuff. But funny, too – part of why it works so damn well.
Well, you’ve just intrigued an outsider enough to want to see an Iranian film– mission accomplished! Great article.