Last night I met my friend Felicia at BAM to see Offside, directed by incarcerated Iranian director (there hasn’t been word of him in a couple of weeks). It is part of their Muslim Voices: The Female Perspective. I have written of Offside before and how much I love it, and Felicia had never seen it, so it was going to be a fun night. Underneath it for me was a solemnity, because watching a work by a man who is now in prison, for no reason other than his being an artist (I don’t care what the “police” say about his other “crimes”), is a sobering experience. But that was the only sober part about the night, adding to the tension of the film, because Offside is NOT solemn or sober, although it takes on a serious topic (women not being allowed to go to soccer games in Iran) – it is kinetic, very funny, very talk-y – that’s all everyone does – talk, argue, scream, debate – and unlike Panahi’s The Circle, which also takes on the position of women in Iran, but in a much more serious and blunt way , Offside is, in its way, even more subversive, because it dares to laugh at the stupidity of the rules. It MOCKS the rules. There’s a reason why Offside was never shown officially in Iran (although, through bootleg DVDs smuggled in from basically everywhere, it became Panahi’s biggest hit, and his most widely seen film in Iran) – and that’s because it’s even worse to have the populace laugh in your face over the moronic rules.
The lead girl, played by Shayesteh Irani, has a long scene where she chats up one of the guards holding all the girls in a makeshift pen behind the soccer stadium. She senses that somewhere he is weak, that he doesn’t believe in what he is doing, so she sets about to crack through. She works him. She doesn’t openly berate him. She says, “Remember when Iran played Japan? How come Japanese women were allowed in the stadium?” He replies, “They are Japanese.” Her face lights up. “Oh, so it’s only because I was born in Iran that I can’t go in?” She’s toying with him, setting him up like a good prosecuting attorney. He tries to scoff at this. “No – it’s because men and women can’t sit together.” She says, “But they sit together at the movies.” He is a country-boy, not from Tehran (one of the underlying class commentaries in the film), and does not believe her. “They do? Where?” She has actually visited his home town and mentions that she went to the movies in his hometown and saw men and women sitting together. “No! It cannot be! Were they dressed like you?” (She is dressed as a boy.) She laughs. “Of course not. They were dressed as ladies.” “Well, they must have been with their brothers or fathers, then.” Another chink in the armor, so her face lights up. “So it would be okay if our fathers or brothers took us to the game?” Every one of his lame excuses (and you get the sense that they are parroted out of his mouth, and by the end of the film, you can see that he flat out doesn’t know why women aren’t allowed in) she mocks, and also intellectually challenges. Like I said, Offside is full of dialogue, end to end. Panahi’s script pulls no punches, but it resists being didactic, because of the sense of humor and excitement running through the whole thing.
It was filmed during the actual Iran-Bahrani game in 2006, where Iran qualified for the World Cup, so you can hear the surging screams of 100,000 people just inside the stadium, as the imprisoned girls, dressed up like boys, ache and yearn to see what is going on inside. While the issue of being arrested by the Vice Squad is nothing to sneeze at, the girls are undaunted, due to the circumstances of the moment. Yes, they are in trouble, but what the hell is going on with the game??
I murmured to Felicia in one of the early scenes, “Sports fans are the same everywhere,” and we just started laughing. Everyone shouting, with the colors of the flag painted on their faces, breaking out into random fights, leaning out the minibus windows shouting at passing cars. The girls just want to participate in the national event.
One of Offside‘s defining characteristics is how funny it is. These girls are pistols, man, and there are very funny scenes where you can see the guards conferring with one another, and they are all serious and worried and frustrated, but in the background, in the pen, you can see all the girls dancing around, and blabbing, and re-enacting their favorite plays from such-and-such a game – they are completely and totally unconcerned with how much trouble they are in, and they laugh at the guards, sometimes in their faces. When the Vice Squad van comes to take them away, they are told to walk in single-file into the bus, and so they march off, and as they walk past the open gate where you can see inside the stadium, each one of them cranes her neck to the side, peering through the gate, to try to see the game. It is a very funny moment (the audience at BAM laughed uproariously – we pretty much laughed through the whole thing – a strangely ironic and beautiful experience), seeing the girls, being taken to some undisclosed location, not allowed to call their parents, but still … still … even in the middle of all of that … as they are frog-marched to the bus, you can see each one, one after the other, turn her head to the side and squint into the distance to try to see the game.
Panahi is wonderful with details like this, you can feel his vibrant humorous personality running throughout. He has a daughter, a wife (both of whom were arrested in the original roundup at his home early this month – and were soon released), and his sense of injustice about their position in his country is obviously fierce. But at least with Offside, he took an absurdist tact – making the situation seem as ridiculous as possible – to have even the guards not know the reasons for the arrests of these girls – to drive his point home again and again and again.
There is a funny moment when one of the guards (and you can feel him grasping at straws) informs the girls that women are not allowed in the stadiums because it’s all men in there, and men curse and use bad language. One of the girls replies to this, “Bullshit.”
Ahh, Panahi, I love you so.
The girls refuse to accept the answers given to them. Why shouldn’t they come see the game like everyone else? Why should they be forced to dress like men? (Panahi doesn’t make a big deal of the veil. The VEIL is not the problem. His view is: Women should be able to dress as they would like to dress, and go where they would like to go. His criticism is that rules such as the soccer rule creates a division in the populace at large: if women want to go to a soccer game – a soccer game – they must dress up as men, denying their gender – and when you force women into a position where her gender becomes a detriment, then all of society suffers. He doesn’t care about the veil. He said in one interview that if a woman is very religious, and wants to wear the full black chador, AND she also happens to be a soccer fan, then there is no reason that she should be forced to deny her gender and her religious feelings – in order to see a stupid soccer game.)
There wasn’t a big crowd at the movie last night, but it was a fun audience. Dear people, whoever you are, I loved seeing Offside with you, especially the crowd of laughing boisterous girls in the back, who got all the jokes, and guffawed throughout. It’s rather eerie, knowing that Panahi is in prison now, but I guess that going to see one of his biggest successes, and enjoying it in the full spirit of absurdity in which he created it, is a great tribute to him, even though … how could he, sitting in a prison right now, know about us? And know that this is what we are doing at this very moment?
I can only hope that somehow, on some other plane, he does know.
He tells a great story in an interview about his inspiration for Offside. He was heading to a soccer game at the Azadi Stadium in Tehran. His 10 year old daughter wanted to come. He told her no, she couldn’t, girls aren’t allowed in, and that it is a stupid law but we must obey the law. She begged to come along and at least try. He relented, but told her if she was turned away at the gate, he was going to go on in to the game, and she had to head home. She agreed. They arrived at the stadium, and his daughter is stopped at the gate. “You can’t come in here.” (Yeah, because it’s so threatening to have a 10 year old girl watch a soccer game. Stupid.) As agreed, Panahi and his daughter parted. Panahi went into the stadium and his daughter headed off for home. Panahi found his seat in the stadium and sat down. About 15 minutes later, he glanced up, and saw his daughter walking down the steps towards him. She sat next to him, quite pleased with herself. Panahi was amazed and asked her, “How did you get in?” She glanced at him, like that was almost a stupid question, and replied, “There is always a way.”
