New York Film Festival Update #6:
Looking for Drama in the Muslim World
A look at Offside and Climates
By Aaron Hillis
Posted October 12th, 2006, 5 P.M. EST
Middle Eastern cinema figured heavily into the features and shorts of 2005's fest lineup, but other than the Egyptian girls-gone-wild doc These Girls, only a couple of dramas this year come from predominantly Muslim nations. The more lighthearted of the two is the sweetly affecting Offside, from one of Iran's most important and provocative writer-directors, Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Crimson Gold). As humanist as his previous works of social criticism, Panahi's latest is more optimistic than usual — often bordering on being a comedy — as it conveys the woes of diehard soccer fans who are prohibited from attending a game because they happen to be female. Willing to disguise themselves as men for the sake of their own patriotism, these young women are living proof of how a progressive culture hasn't quite caught up with the dehumanizing inequalities of its past. On the particular day this story unfolds, a disparate group of girls in Tehran try to sneak into Iran's World Cup qualifier against Bahrain (shot naturalistically in real time during the actual match); we follow them from the chanting minibuses of fans headed towards Azadi stadium through the crowds of exploitative scalpers and army soldiers who stand in their way. But then they're caught by humiliated men who don't want to be in the army, and who are entirely unprepared to handle their detainees' banter (the guards' best excuse for why they aren't allowed inside: girls shouldn't be subjected to swearing men acting rowdy), which further comments on the uneasy gender divide. In their makeshift holding area outside the stadium's upper level, the girls' plucky rebellion and camaraderie escape in tiny episodes that subtly reflect upon the ridiculousness of Iranian law, such as when one needs to be escorted to the restroom wearing a soccer-star poster over her face with the eyes cut out. Or the feisty girl who shows up in handcuffs wearing a soldier's uniform, slightly boastful of how her ruse almost worked except that she sat in a captain's chair inside the press box. In the end, as the women are driven to the vice squad for whatever prosecution awaits, the joy of Iran's win spills into the streets and, to everyone's benefit, cultural pride assumes the greatest victory.
Climates |
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The flip side of girl power is weak masculinity, which the Turkish drama Climates rains down with the subtlety of a monsoon. Written, directed, and starring Nuri Bilge Ceylan as a contemptible professor whose passive-aggressive ego makes him impossible to date, Ceylan's follow-up to 2002's Distant continues to showcase an existential tranquility and slow burn that might make Tarkovsky proud. However, where Distant deepened from a drollness that underscored the contrary dynamics of that film's lead city boy and country-cousin roomie, Climates grimly centers around flat, unknowable characters who brood before a perfectly still camera, sometimes without understanding why. It's like the feeling one gets from that now-famous Birth close-up where Nicole Kidman gradually breaks down into tears during an opera, but repeated without perspective for an hour-and-a-half. In a pretitle intro that lasts well over six minutes, middle-aged Isa (Ceylan) photographs ancient ruins in the desert while his younger, TV art-director girlfriend, Bahar (Ceylan's real-life wife, Ebru), mopes around. "Are you bored?" he asks. "No," she responds. And truthfully, it would also be unfair to dismiss Climates as boring, regardless of how simplistic it is. That's what makes the film such a frustrating paradox: Technically, it rewards with nothing less than painterly cinematography and a seamless surge of organic soundscapes, but the story is entirely predicated on a weather metaphor so obvious that even an unplugged Doppler radar could detect it. Are we to find profundity about relationships from the wimpy duality of the film, where the first half (on Turkey's sunny west coast) concerns an ironically frosty breakup during a beachfront summer, as opposed to the second half (on the snowy east coast), where a lukewarm rekindling nearly happens amid the bitter winter? Ceylan's images are ripe for reawakening the silent alienation of early Antonioni, but his observations here are superficial, and that great Distant wit now seems clumsy or forced. I genuinely dig when the television crew keeps obliviously storing equipment inside the van where Isa tries to share an intimate moment with Bahar, but the repeated gag of an empty nightstand shelf used as a painful pillow feels like it's begging for a rim shot. And what does Ceylan expect from the "consensual rape" sex scene fetishizing stale nuts dropped on the floor? An irreverent giggle? Sadism without an audience payoff is only greater sadism.
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