‘No Bears’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Jafar Panahi. Iran. 2022. 107mins

Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi has become a master of making films against the odds since 2011, when his government banned him from directing for 20 years. The result has been a series of brilliantly inventive statements which have boldly capitalised on the very restrictions they struggle against – among them, This is Not a Film, Closed Curtain and 2015 Berlin Golden Bear winner Taxi Tehran. Now Panahi has been sentenced to six years imprisonment, partly for protesting against the arrest of fellow film-makers, which means that his new film No Bears may be the last we hear from him for a while. Don’t count on it, though – this Venice competition entry, which heads immediately to Toronto and New York, stands as Panahi’s latest testimony – and a very overt one – to the way that artistry and protest will find a voice, regardless. A complex work of novelistic density, this is among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers, and one which will appeal at least as widely as his previous works to global arthouse audiences.

Among the boldest and most accomplished statements from one of the world’s exemplary filmmakers

The films of what you might call Panahi’s dissident era - the last decade - have tended to be acutely self-reflexive, but here, Panahi chips away further at the fourth wall. The film begins with a fabulously artful long take, showing a street scene in an Turkish town, where a café waitress named Zara (Mina Kavani) meets up with her husband Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Panjeei). He has brought her a stolen passport which will allow her to reach Paris, where Bakhtiar plans to join her; the couple are Iranians who have been trying for a long time to leave the country permanently.

Just when we’re beginning to get involved with their story, someone shouts “Cut!”, and a crafty transition shows the scene being watched on a laptop by none other than Jafar Panahi, playing himself. He’s directing a film remotely – a docu-fiction based on the couple’s actual experiences – and in order to be closer to the shoot, has chosen to stay in a small Iranian village near the Turkish border, rather than in Tehran with a better internet connection.

Once bad reception cuts him off, he talks to Ghanbar (Vahid Mobaseri), an affable villager who is renting his spartan quarters to Panahi, casually takes a few photos, and gives Ghanbar his camera to film a local engagement ceremony. As the film zigzags between Panahi’s village experience and the film-within-a-film, assistant director Reza (Reza Heydari), visits and drives Panahi to the border, which he suggests he might want to cross with the help of smugglers – for a few hours, or perhaps considerably longer.

Meanwhile, Panahi’s casual photographs have got him and others into trouble. A picture he has supposedly taken shows a young woman with a suitor, but not the fiancé to whom she was promised at birth. The village chief (Naser Hashemi) – ostensibly jovial, but then increasingly authoritarian - insists that Panahi produce the photo as evidence. He denies there was ever such a picture and the villagers, including a now compromised Ghanbar, insist that Panahi take an oath on it in the local traditional ‘swearing room’ (a place said to be surrounded by bears, although that’s just to deter interlopers, hence the film’s title)

Meanwhile, the actors in his film turn to camera to accuse Panahi of being irresponsible with their real-life story. As both strands heads towards drastic parallel outcomes, Panahi faces the consequences of capturing images, still or moving, however honourable or innocent the intention.

The film somewhat resembles The Wind Will Carry Us, by the late Abbas Kiarostami, Panahi’s one-time associate, in its depiction of a city dweller out of his depth in a traditional rural community – and No Bears seems to play sly homage to that film’s running gag about the difficulties of getting internet reception in the countryside. This is also a story of urbanites’ expectations coming into conflict with the power of tradition, which characters are endlessly invoking here; although those traditions may be obscure, arbitrary and oppressive.

A theme throughout – at first comic, though it takes on grimmer resonance – is the villagers’ suspicion of an outsider who might be a troublemaker or spy. In a turn of events with unmistakable political resonance, we learn that a member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been leaning on Ghanbar over Panahi’s activities. In the end, the village comes to resemble a microcosm of an Iran in which everyone risks being either leaned on by draconian authority, or co-opted into complicity with it.

The film juggles its layers of story and image very adroitly, with occasional touches of roughness in the digital image only adding to the immediacy. The cast mixes the lively casualness of the village population with a more manifestly thespian intensity, notably when Zara turns to the camera to angrily recount the ordeal she has endured in ten years of trying to flee abroad. As in previous ‘auto-fictions’ such as Taxi Tehran, Panahi himself is a likeable, self-mocking presence, who presents himself as a somewhat bossy figure who thinks he’s everyone’s best friend but doesn’t realise the problematic ripples his presence creates. He may not be directly responsible for the trouble his cameras seem to generate, but the very act of capturing images, it seems, carries a moral weight that a filmmaker must be prepared to carry.

The film ends, after an extended shot, with the image of Panahi in his car staring ahead, apparently contemplating his present situation, and his future. Given his current predicament, that ending couldn’t be more resonant – and No Bears couldn’t be more powerful as a statement of ethical seriousness, tenacity and defiance towards the bears, real or imaginary, of fear.