This Is Not A Film

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 5, 2011.

Don't be fooled by the title: This Is Not A Film is a lot more than just another movie.  Shot this March and smuggled out of Iran on a USB drive inside a cake, the unofficial sixth feature by persecuted director Jafar Panahi is a brave political protest, a logical culmination of the reflexive tradition in Iranian filmmaking, a mockumentary more alarming than the Paranormal Activity series, and an inspiring demonstration of what is meant by “grace under pressure”.

Panahi has long been known as a frank critic of Iranian society - particularly its mistreatment of women – but came to the attention of a wider global public when he was arrested, in 2009, for unspecified crimes against the state.  Since then, he's been set free then arrested once more; currently he's banned from filmmaking for the next two decades, and faces the prospect of six years in prison.

Billed as an “effort” by Panahi and his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb – the names of other collaborators have been redacted – This Is Not A Film unfolds almost entirely within Panahi's apartment and purports to chronicle a largely uneventful day in his life. With his wife and children away visiting relatives over the lead-up to Persian New Year, he awaits the verdict on his latest court appeal; in between calls from his lawyer, he sips tea, nibbles on sugar cubes and feeds lettuce leaves to his daughter's pet iguana.

It's cinema degree zero, with Panahi initially positioning himself in front of a fixed camera which, in accordance with the government's wishes, he avoids handling directly.  Later, Mirtahmasb drops by to serve as camera operator, giving Panahi the chance to take anti-filmmaking to the next level – screening clips from his earlier works and reading aloud from scripts that will never make it to the screen.

Like many things about This Is Not A Film, the title is a wry joke with at least two meanings.  On the one hand, Panahi ironically claims to function merely as a performer playing himself – though he's seen shooting supplementary material on his mobile phone, and has to be reprimanded for yelling “Cut!” From a different point of view, Panahi and Mirtahmasb regularly ask themselves if their joint project deserves to be called a film, given the absence of sets, costumes, actors or conventional narrative. Moreover, can Panahi's situation be transmuted into art without telling some kind of lie?

Luckily, Iranian cinema has had many years to grapple with questions of precisely this sort. There's a genuinely harrowing edge to this self-portrait by a gifted man who faces losing his freedom, his livelihood and his means of expression.  But it's also thrilling to see Panahi draw a line in the sand, pitting his own sophistication against brute state power.

Far less transparent than it first appears, This Is Not A Film is a prime example of what Panahi's mentor Abbas Kiarostami has termed the “half-finished” film, where part of the meaning must be supplied by the viewer.  As usual in Panahi's work, the physical setting becomes a maze traversed by a protagonist increasingly desperate to find a way out.  Yet the film retains a gentle humour and an affection for the mundane surface of things: in this urgent context, actions like making breakfast or watching TV seem precious as never before.

Panahi knows, too, that he has a genuine movie star at his disposal in Igi the iguana, who provides light relief during some of the more sombre scenes by crawling across a bookcase or onto his master's lap. Igi is no mere symbol, and probably appears on camera mostly because he happened to be around at the time.  But he represents something all the same: the ungovernable aspect of life which Panahi has always sought to capture in his films, but which refuses, by its very nature, to be directed.