Iranian director Jafar Panahi has examined the plight of women in his country before, in 2000's elegantly constructed The Circle. In that picture, the multiple story lines of women trying to pursue their own destinies in the course of an evening converge in the back of a police van. Here, various young women, who are officially banned from attending sporting events, meet up at a World-Cup-qualifying soccer match in Tehran's Azadi stadium. Not inside the stadium, mind you. They are caught by soldiers and detained in a makeshift pen at the stadium's outer wall. Hence, then, the title.
Except for a brief glimpse of the field and some shots of a televised transmission, we, like the girls, never get to see the game against Bahrain. Most of the film is taken up with the roiling exchanges between the girls and the soldiers who are supposed to look after them. Like the girls, these conscripts are avid soccer fans. Each side resents the other, as each side is responsible — or so it's believed — for the other missing the action. At times an uneasy détente is reached, with a soldier peering through the bars of a stadium gate to provide a play-by-play. But if one soldier starts worrying too much about what the chief's going to say when he gets here, or if one girl gets out of line by mouthing off too emphatically, or smoking too emphatically (as the one played by Shayesteh Irani does), poof, it's war again.
From these minimal means the masterly Panahi concocts a spellbinding, often corrosively and/or warmly funny story in which love of both country and sport tries to, but doesn't quite, transcend dogmatic and ingrained difference. Until, that is, the very end, when the outcome of the game is announced from the not-fully-functioning radio of the police van that's taking the girls (and one firecracker-concealing boy) to the station. The celebration that follows culminates in an unforgettable final shot; a simple evocation of fleeting grace that's as emotionally shattering as it is unexpected.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.