Tres caras

This is a brilliant film. Beautiful, poignant, unpredictable, quite harsh yet with a few sparks of humour. The actors (mostly playing themselves) and the screenplay are amazing. It does require a lot of attention and analysis, as it covers several social issues (artists' and women's rights mainly) with subtle metaphors and a peculiar visual "language". Some moments were a bit too cryptic for me, probably due to a cultural gap. You have to respect Jafar Pahani for managing to create such a rich and multi-layered visual story under such hard conditions and constraints. I highly recommend "Se rokh".

The old, forgotten actress, the established, popular actress and an aspiring actress. Against the cultural landscape of Iran it can be tricky to do this profession as a woman.

Metafiction, docufiction and everything in between. Of course, it's Jafar Panahi, it's expected to find plenty of discourse about movie-making and its difficulties. At one point, the actress is trying to explain to an old villager that the actor he admires cannot come back to Iran anymore and Panahi cannot leave Iran. It's a short line, we get it. The man doesn't, of course, but it wasn't really for him. There's also a healthy dose of criticism against the patriarchy by merely observing these people and letting it all play out. There is no discourse served to the audience, no loud, rousing statements. Some of these men would kill to avenge their skewed idea of honour.

Although I appreciated most of the scenes, it did feel a little too long, although it's really not, and maybe Panahi's metafiction is beginning to wear me out. But I guess he did get a chance to make the movie he was referring to in "This Is Not a Film". At least the core idea from there is the same, even if the story goes to a different place. Girl from a conservative family wants to study, but her family forbids it. She contemplates suicide.

Jafar Panahi, who made more than two decades before the wonderful The White Baloon, has been prohibited by Iranian State to make movies. However, he disobeyed, and his resistance led to his latter films. It is a 20-year filmmaking ban, and this film is the fourth he made under those dire circumstances. It is a road movie which interwines reality (almost as a documentary) and fiction. Pahani travels with actress Behnaz Jafari, both in the roles of themselves, to a smal Turkish-speaking village to search information about a very young actress who supposedly commmited suicide motivated by her family's dissapproval of her career. The movie reminds Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, but in a level below. Anyway, the contrast between big city artists and conservative and traditional folk is striking. The movie becomes more interesting when, diversely from Kiarostami's road movie, it explores the thee faces, three generations of Iranian actresses. Through their behaviour, concerns and feelings we get in touch with the changing conditions for making art in Iran, particularly if you are a woman, as Jafari, or a critical filmmaker, as Panahi.

"3 Faces" (2018 release from Iran; 100 min.) brings the story of Behnaz Jafari, a popular Iranian actress (and playing herself in this film). As the movie opens, a teenage girl posts an Instagram addressed to Jafari, where she seemingly hangs herself, distraught at the fact that her family won't let her study at an art school in Tehran. Jafari and a friend (director Panahi, playing himself) decide to searches for the girl... At this point we're 10 min. into the movie but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Couple of comments: this is the latest movie from writer-director Jafar Panahi, who in 2010 was banned by the Iranian authorities from making any more movies. Panahi's excellent 2011 movie "This Is Not a Film" was the first to be made during that ban, and "3 Faces" is the 4th. Working on a micro-budget and at great personal risk, Panahi and his crew nevertheless manage to brings us a riveting film about what life in rural Iran is really like., and the cost in terms of the human condition. In other words, this is the perfect opposite of the latest Marvel superhero movie. Given the plot-heavy nature of the movie, I can't say much more.

"3 Faces" premiered at this year's Cannes film festival to universal acclaim, and Panahi won (in absentia, of course) the festival's Best Screenplay award. I'd say the chances of this movie getting an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Movie are pretty good too. I happen to catch this film during a recent family visit in Belgium. The early evening screening where I saw this at in Antwerp, Belgium was not attended well (exactly 5 people, myself included). Regardless, if you are in the mood for a top notch foreign film that was made despite a ban on the director, I'd readily suggest you check this out, be it in the theater (if and when this reaches US theaters), on VOD, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray, and draw your own conclusion.

To the pantheon of road movies we can add Jafar Panahi's "Se rokh" ("3 Faces" in English), about an actress traveling across the country. Panahi plays himself in the movie. It's amazing that he managed to make the movie, as he's currently banned from making movies, due to depicting things that Iran's government finds inappropriate (such as "Offside", in which women try to attend a soccer game but get kept out of the stadium due to the sight of men in shorts).

Watching this movie, I got the feeling that life in Iran's hinterlands must be a miserable existence. It's not a great movie, but worth seeing as a look at people whom we don't often see.