Three Faces (Sydney Film Festival Review)

So often during history has great art been made under restrictive environments. Typically under an authoritarian government. The most famous period in history where this occurred was the renaissance. Cinema was not around then but the other six art forms were. They all made strides that have come to define how we perceive them today. In the modern age, cinema has come to experience what those art forms have for many centuries. A noted example is Andrei Tarkovsky, whose films had to find new ways to speak out against the Soviet government. However, at this moment I think Jafar Panahi is the strongest case for someone who makes great art while under restrictive conditions. He was arrested in 2010 for “propaganda against the Iranian government”. He was sentenced to gaol but he was let go and is not allowed to leave the country or direct any films.

Well, he’s made four now since he was restrained from leaving Iran and in each, he has found new ways to redefine his films and himself. The first was a simple documentation of his house arrest. His third fictionalised a day driving a taxi in Tehran. Now he and actress Behnaz Jafari search for a girl who has sent Jafari a suicide video/note but they suspect it to be fake. Despite not being the main character in the film I can’t help but feel like that this film is a chapter in Panahi’s life and so is every other film since his arrest.

The simplistic nature of the film steeming from Panahi’s limited resources doesn’t prevent him from finding creative solutions to creative problems. I saw a small handful of films at Sydney Film Festival that featured a deeply rooted family dynamic in which the kids are taught to blindlessly follow their parents and the film took empathy towards the parents. Even if the parent-child relationship ended up happy. In this context, it was refreshing to see Panahi’s empathetic take on women and children in rural Iran.

Iranian life has always been important to Panahi, even when his government arrested him. He never lost his focus on the people, after all, they didn’t arrest him. This is Not a Film was about himself, Tehran Taxi was about life in, you guessed it, Tehran and now he returns to the focus of his earlier, fiction work the people of Iran. In particularly women and children.

The men in the film often talk about the traditions of the town. Such as burying a boy’s circumcised foreskin near where their professional life will take them and beeping horns along a narrow, curvy road to see if any cars are around the corner. When recounting stories the men seem to exaggerate their stories. They aren’t exposed to forms of entertainment that surpass the scale of the spoken word. The women in the film often battle tradition vs progress. They still respect their heritage but they would rather see it be built upon so they too can succeed in life. This is the challenge the girl who sent the tape is facing. She yearns to study film but only a face her parents recognise could change their mind. Panahi is able to boil down the debate of the role of women in Iran by glancing at his perspective of looking through the women’s. Then focusing on the women in the film. They even drive the film forward more emotionally and plot-wise than he does. This is quite remarkable when he isn’t even meant to be making films.

It would be easy to mistake the film as a cry for help from Panahi. The suicide video may seem like Panahi is extending his situation to a girl and while I am sure this is meant to express the fact that everyone in Iran has their freedom challenged. I doubt Panahi is explicitly stating that “This girl is me”. Why would he say that he and the girl are the same when the rest of the film has shows empathy for the women in the film. The girl has her family to convince to let her do anything, he does not. Panahi is probably saying that everyone is in this boat together yet we must not lose sight of who we are individual. A society should never be run under a collectivism or individualism ideal. We should take care of each other to better understand ourselves. It’s this unique, empathetic approach to all of the people in the film that set Panahi apart from his contemporaries.

If the Renaissance was the rebirth of European culture then in a way Three Faces is a renaissance of Panahi’s mentor and friend Abbas Kiarostami who passed away in 2016. If the original renaissance was about the rediscovery of Greek and Roman arts so that it lives on. Therefore, Three Faces will be the prime example of the effect Kiarostami’s work has had on other people and the impact of the personal relationships he had with his contemporaries. When a man like Kiarostami is no longer with us Panahi wants to make sure his legacy lives on and doesn’t fade away, especially in a time where more humanistic films are falling off the map. The influence of Kiarostami's film The Taste of Cherry (which I highly recommend) can be heavily felt throughout including when a woman digs her grave, conversations in a car, panning shots along the country roads, and an existential camera. Panahi has made sure his good friend’s work lives on forever.

Any viewer could tell you that Panahi has been blurring the line between fiction and documentary ever since his arrest. In Three Faces the camera is ever present. It seldom moves, sometimes letting the character fall out of shot. Even when it does move it feels artificial like it’s someone’s perspective. In a way, it’s shot by an invisible doco crew.

Jafar Panahi is more than a modern day example of an artist repressed under the system he lives under. He is a continuation of the artists being challenged but not giving up by challenging those that try to stop them. Yet, he doesn’t lose sight of himself. Like Kiarostami before him, he makes gentle and enlightened films that look closer at not only Iranian society but ours too. It’s not often that films like this come around so you if you see good things and hear good things about this film you should see this good film*.

Overall Score: 9/10

What do you think of this film? It will be distributed by Madman Films so keep an eye out for it.

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Director: Jafar Panahi

Writers: Jafar Panahi & Nader Saeivar

Starring: Jafar Panahi, Behnaz Jafari, Marziyeh Rezaei & Maedeh Erteghaei

Cinematographer: Amin Jafari

Editor: Mastaneh Mohajer

*I don’t recall the film ever mentioning the three wise monkeys but upon reflection the girl, Panahi and Jafari seem to make up the three.