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The Mirror

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The Mirror is a deceptively slight tale of a little girl trying to find her way home after her Mom inexplicably fails to pick her up after school. By Hollywood's (or Bollywood's) obsessively plot-driven standards, this is not enough to hang a movie on, but there is much more going on beneath this seemingly simple surface.

Part of the pleasure of non-blockbuster non-genre films is to watch the movie unfold without the expectations of a plot point at minute 20 and all the other artifices of Hollywood script doctors. Nothing wrong with genre films (romantic comedies, thrillers, mysteries, etc.) but they take us on a route we've already traveled before. Not so this film.

Did you ever become lost as a young child? This movie captures that anxiety and the confusion of partially remembered clues in an uncaring, distracted adult world. We feel the girl's worry, and fear for her amidst the traffic and the indifference of the adults. We cheer on the occasional adult who offers to lend a hand, and fall back to worry when the help leads to another blind alley.

Much of the film's charm lies in the naturalistic "acting" (or shall we say non-acting?) of the lead character, the adorable little girl, while the unadorned street scenes of Tehran give us a "real life" window into everyday life of the Iranian people: bus drivers changing shifts, an old woman complaiing that her son ignores her, several adults' half-hearted attempts to help the little girl recongize her pathway home, and the constant flow of autos which seem to ignore traffic signals. (The Iranian street police are shown in a positive light; while most of the adults seem indifferent to the child's plight, the policeman does try to help the girl.)

Perhaps the girl's unsettled, disjointed journey home is a metaphor for the entire Iranian experience. Given the cultural constraints (many Iranian films focus on children, no doubt partly as a mechanism for bypassing censorship), what better way to illustrate the journey of the Iranian people from the repression of the Shah's reign through the tumult of the Revolution to the discord and disappointment of the present than a child's uncertain, half-remembered search for the way home? Why call a film "The Mirror" unless it mirrors something larger than a little girl's heartstring-tugging journey home?

This interpretation is reinforced by the radical break which occurs halfway through the film. I won't spoil the movie by describing this surprise in detail, but the pulling aside of the veil between reality and film has a long history--usually in comedy. Bob Hope's asides to the viewer in his 40s-era comedies no doubt inspired Woody Allen's similar aside in Annie Hall (while waiting in line to see a movie, he turns to "us" and excoriates a blowhard intellectual standing behind him), and Mel Brook literally broke down the wall between movie and "reality" in Blazing Saddles, when his film crew burst through a soundstage wall into a Busby-Berkeley-type musical being filmed next door.

The break in The Mirror is more disturbing, for it suggests the artifice of film as a metaphor for an Iran which has lost its way cannot be maintained, that real emotion cannot be constrained by the process of filmmaking. The "mirror" of the title is not only a mirror held up to Iranian society, but to the viewer of the film. Once the suspension of belief which is integral to movies has been torn aside, we enter an entirely new movie, one which challenges our understanding both of film as a medium and of Iranian culture.

This film is an experience you won't easily forget.

It's not hilarious, exactly. I'm guessing the blunt political critique is about the status of women in Iran, because (overheard) women and men were constantly talking about the issue. In the middle of it all was a very smart, blunt girl trying to make her way home while the adults around her either callously ignored her (in the 1st movie) or ineptly gathered around to help (in the 2nd). It was really 2 movies in one, and in each one a major figure was the missing mother who wasn't guiding the girl home.

This film is a perfect piece of cinema -"perfect", because it manages to acknowledge the frame of cinematic vision and to throw it into question, making us see --and return to-- life outside of the fantasy of cinema. (This struck me as a variation on the Muslim tradition of shunning representation --not that Panahi seems to be orthodox, but rather adapting a tradition to which he may belong only culturally.)

The film is also perfect because of its attention to perspective --here, the child's perspective. It is a perfect piece of moral argument from just this gesture.

There's more to say about this simple, understated, yet surprisingly subtle film -a political manifesto without manifest, and a kind of tacit declaration of the rights of the child, without declaration.

I will always remember the most memorable scene in the movie Love Actually. It is a scene that was omitted from the film, but shown in the dvd extra: a scene where a photograph of African tribal farmers working in the fields comes to life. A man and a woman is working, but they look at each other with a sparkle in their eyes. The director(?) explains something to the effect that he wanted to show people outside a culture that all the things they (meaning Westerners), see in their media are not the full breadth of a daily existence, that love, for example, exists.

There's a beautiful scene in The Mirror, where the little girl sits on a public bus, and she sees a man and a woman, separated by gender lines according to public transportation rules. In the gorgeous late afternoon light and with street musicians playing in the aisle, they look at each other with stolen glances of love and adoration.

For those who are not familiar with the available Iranian films in this country (or those who don't care to explore), such scenes would not exist in their imagination. Yet I do think it's our great fortune that Jafar Panahi is able to show a wondrous humanity that is often absent in the American consciousness of Iranian people.

The film is shot at a child's eye level, which means we see the little girl literally sandwiched between layers upon layers of bustling Tehranian traffic. I found myself holding to the edge of my seat oftentimes throughout the movie, literally gritting my teeth at how close she comes to moving cars. Of course, photographers will know this is created by the foreshortening in a telephoto lens, but it does expertly capture the density of the city.

For me, the midway interruption (the child stops agreeing to be filmed and walks off the set) is really a deconstruction of the customs and laws women in Iran have to subscribe to. The completion of the film is the individual obligation a woman has to maintain and abide by cultural rules. The little girl's rejection of the film, the film crew, and subsequently, one person after another (mostly men) could be read as an all-out rebellion against authority.

Mina Mohammad Khani sustains the biggest pout of the century throughout the length of the film. If for nothing else, the film is a good way see a bit of Iran. This film precedes Panahi's masterpiece, The Circle.