Directed by Jafar Panahi
Year: 2022
Languages: Persian, Azerbaijani, Turkish (Local title: خرس نیست)
Shaun’s Score: 4.1/5 ★
Before Watching:
Just when I thought Elizabeth Banks had turned me off of ursine cinema, I find the honey pot at the end of the rainbow. I regrettably missed this film in the original 2022 festival circuit, and thus had omitted it from my Top 10 Films of 2022 list.1 Filmmaker Jafar Panahi has long been a subversive force in Middle Eastern cinema, with controversial works like The Circle (2000) and This is Not a Film (2011). His latest release is No Bears, shot secretly in Iran. Before he could attend its premiere at the 79th Venice Film Festival, Panahi was arrested by the Iranian government and sentenced to 6 years in prison on charges of “propaganda against the regime.”
Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself, secretly directing a docudrama in Turkey over Skype. His character has been prohibited from leaving Iran after producing politically incendiary films, which isn’t dissimilar to Panahi’s reality. In the film, he’s rented a room in a small village near the Turkish border, and inadvertently gets tangled in some neighborhood drama while using his camera around town. As the he-said-she-said spat escalates and troubles materialize for his film, Panahi is further and further mired in restrictions—administrative restrictions from the government, and cultural restrictions from local superstitions and customs. The challenges Panahi faces are unbearably Kafkaesque.
No Bears is reflexive, meta-cinema done right. Movies about making movies (à la Babylon) often stumble in finding a thesis statement beyond “Isn’t what I do cool?” Panahi takes a different approach, baking in criticism and inquisition, challenging the purpose, resilience, and consequence of filmmaking. Panahi’s camera—both inside and outside the conceit—is not a passive observer, but a force of its own, often generating more hassle than he had desired. In this way, No Bears reminds me of the old thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat. We discussed at length in college physics how opening the box causes nature to collapse the quantum state to one eigenstate, either killing the cat or leaving it be.2 In this way, observing the world actually changes the world (there are no passive observers), and for both the real and fictitious Panahi, No Bears bears witness to that political reality.
No Bears premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize. It is now screened in theaters, and available for rent on Apple TV and Prime Video.
After Watching:
Panahi masterfully highlights the binds placed on him by both the state’s relocation restrictions and the community’s superstitions. He attempts to reason with the townspeople, employing logic like “if you are using this child’s testimony as evidence against me, then you shouldn’t need my photo,” but it gets lost in the murk of tradition. The suspicion and hostility he encounters as an outsider in the community is only exacerbated by these ongoing subversions, like recording his final testimony instead of swearing it on the Quran. When, at last, he comes face to face with the devastating result of the star-crossed lovers’ story, he stares off into the distance and stops his car, unable to see a way out of this labyrinth.
Like in many of his films, Panahi is the originator of each creative decision in No Bears. Just look at the credits for his 2015 Golden Bear recipient Taxi:
But, compared to Lin Manuel-Miranda or Baz Luhrmann (or even Hong Sang-soo, who does his own film scoring too) there’s something uniquely striking about Panahi writing, directing, producing, and starring in his own creation. Here, he’s the front man because he is absorbing all of the political risk for himself, and shielding any other collaborators. As a reminder, Iran’s Ministry of Culture dubbed the film a “political game,” underscoring how the production was unlicensed, and jailed him for 6 years. In diving headfirst into this quagmire, Panahi exhibits cinematic bravery that is otherwise uncommon on the world stage—he, like his characters, is emboldened and unafraid to keep the claws out.
P.S. Some recent good news about Panahi’s freedom…
As an update, I have inserted it into the original post, where it now ranks 6th.
Of course, depending on your interpretation of quantum physics, this conclusion doesn’t make much sense, and the takeaway is often that quantum superposition is simply not comprehendible in the context of a classical world. But, none of that is relevant for this particular analogy.