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When Jafar Panahi released ‘The Circle’ (2000) it was not the first Iranian film to represent the plight of women in a sympathetic light but the international success it garnered paved the way for others to follow in its footsteps. The director’s sympathy towards the female protagonists is clear through the very blunt tag line used, “her only crime was being a woman.” In just under 90 minutes the audience is shown the various social problems as experienced by several women; a female prisoner, Solnaz (Solmaz Panahi), has given birth to a baby girl and faces divorce as a result; Pari (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy), an ex-prisoner, is pregnant out of wedlock; Arezou (Maryiam Palvin Almani) is forced to prostitute herself for money while Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) feels compelled to find her daughter a new financially stable home. Initially I wondered whether a film with such a high number of female criminals would somehow endorse the idea that women are in some way innately corruptible. However, this film goes to great lengths to portray the opposite and to show just how restrictive an existence these women live. Through doing this it supports the claim that it is in fact the environment the women inhabit, complete with its misogyny and claustrophobia, that is responsible for their various fates.
Panahi is careful however, to make sure his film is not simply a struggle between the genders. Instead he presents an arena where women struggle not necessarily because of men but because of a system imposed by men, a system whose victims are largely female. The system can be manipulated by men in a way which eludes the women but there are times when the men come to rely on the women for help (a young soldier has to ask Pari to phone his girlfriend so as not to arouse the suspicion of his beloved’s male relatives). In order to survive in this labyrinth each woman acknowledges that she must somehow disappear into it completely. The writer Katy Wilkinson has observed that the women are repeatedly framed behind doorways, windows and cars and I would argue that this makes their marginalisation spatial as much as social.
The representation of these women as victims of the state implies that they cannot openly commit an act of rebellion without suffering the consequences; the bruises on Nargess’s face are a visual reminder of the potential ramifications. Unable to express public dissatisfaction, the women in ‘The Circle’ are shown to seek comfort in quiet acts of unassuming dissent, most notable is their repeated attempts to smoke in public, for which they are continuously rebuked. The only woman in the film who manages to successfully smoke a cigarette is the prostitute and only then because the men in the police van complain that they all wish to smoke. She is unable to carry out this small act of defiance without the aid of the men. In several interviews Panahi has placed a particular emphasis on the character of the prostitute and it is clear that she is the least idealistic of all the women (when a policeman asks her rather impetulantly why she works as she does she responds with the straight to the point, “Are you gonna pay the bills, honey?”). She is the last woman we are introduced to and she is the most disillusioned, she is the one woman who seems to have completely understood and reluctantly accepted, the nature of the society she lives in.
Apart from the narrative and dialogue used in ‘The Circle’ Panahi also adopts plenty of visual techniques to align the viewer’s sympathies and often their point of view with each of the individual women as we meet them. The confusion faced by Solmaz’s mother as she awaits news of the birth is experienced by the viewer as Panahi situates the camera close up to the small white shutter of the delivery room door, so that all we see is a white screen. We can hear babies crying and yet it is not immediately clear to the viewer where we are and exactly what is happening. The overall effect is very unsettling. The camera angles used throughout the film are very reminiscent of documentary style filming and there is definitely a fly-on-the-wall feeling for much of the film. In order to position us with the characters, the camera often mimics their movement; when Nargess and Arezou are fleeing from police they duck down to hide and so does the camera; when they look from behind a car’s window, the shot is seen through the car’s framework and more significantly, through their eyes. The effect is that the viewer feels they are directly behind the two, fleeing with them and subsequently, sharing their sense of urgency and panic. Later, when Nargess watches Arezou ascend a spiral staircase, unbeknownst to her in order to prostitute herself for money, Nargess’s wonder is reflected not only through the actress’s face but through the way the camera pans all the way up the staircase following Arezou’s every move. When she later attempts to seek out her friend peering through corridors and staircases, once again the camera is behind her and moves to reflect her actions. During the events of ‘The Circle’ we are very much physically behind the women as well as sympathetically engaged with them. We do not simply observe them, we actually follow them and inhabit their world.
However, there are a few exceptions when the camera angles deviate from this routine and these exceptions are significant. At one-point Pari sits in a taxi and there is a long close up of her face. The use of a close up is a new concept in Iranian cinema and the importance of this should be clarified. Traditionally in non-exploitative Iranian films, women were usually filmed in long shot, sitting down or standing up, as it was considered improper to have lingering shots of their bodies or faces in case it caused sexual distraction for the male viewers. Here this is not only ignored but done so that the viewer can see how distressed Pari actually is.
One of the most repeated motifs experienced by most of the women in ‘The Circle’ is the image of being caged, as if imprisoned in their surroundings. When Nargess and Arezou are running around the streets of Tehran they stop by a gated door and hold onto its rails as if clutching the bars of a prison cell. They have escaped jail and yet it is as if they are still there. When we meet Monir the ticket attendant, she is behind a booth with a metal railing on the front. As Pari clutches Monir’s hands this same prisoner motif is evoked. Towards the end of the film all the women are united in a prison cell and yet this cell is a wide room with the absence of the ‘caged’ image. The irony is that the real cage then is the city itself. The room shown to us is also important because it reminds us how the individual stories interweave and that all the women are connected by their troubles.
Panahi also presents the difficulties faced by women through the behaviour of the men they meet, who are usually although not always, unhelpful or indifferent at best. Nargess and Arezou have to deal with a leering boy on a bicycle as well as a telephone vendor who won’t even look at them when they address him. Nargess encounters a totally unsympathetic ticket operator at the coach station. Pari’s father shows her no sympathy and wants to keep her trapped in the house while her brother initiates a violent altercation which results in her fleeing her home. When the prostitute and her client are arrested, the policeman releases the client (who has the audacity to complain to the prostitute that she has gotten him into a mess) but insists on taking the prostitute to the station. It is significant that the women in ‘The Circle’ are not judgemental towards each other. Although Pari is initially appalled that Nayereh is going to leave her daughter she does not criticise her because she knows that she has also committed an act which her society considers reprehensible. This scene is very clever because Panahi juxtaposes the two women’s sadness with the arrival of a wedding party in full celebration. As one family is falling apart, another is being created through the socially acceptable union of marriage.
We can establish then that 'The Circle' succeeds in showing us representations of women who are experiencing extreme social problems and it portrays their predicaments in a way which makes us as viewers feel sympathy for them but also acknowledge that their environment is oppressing them and creating many of the problems that they encounter. The film represents women as being the victims of a system obsessed with maintaining an archaic status quo. Panahi’s women are victims of society, buckling under the weight of social and cultural oppression, desperate for an escape and a solution. Panahi cannot give them a solution but by depicting the troubles they face he has certainly brought them one step closer to it.
Country: Iran, Switzerland, Italy
Budget: £5,000
Length: 87mins
Pub/2009
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