“The Circle”
by Jafar Panahi
The Seventh Circle of hell would be a grim landscape where you trudge along a roundabout with
fellow men and women just like you, mud up to your ankles, body exhausted and eyes spent,
having lost the capacity to suffer, and with no desires and no wishes left except the impossible
one that it would all stop. And this for eternity.
This is what you have in Jafar Panahi’s ―The Circle‖ except that the trudgers are all women.
The film uses a simple, matter-of-fact, documentary-like approach to what it means to be a
woman in Iran today. It demonstrates with clarity this running away from the hell that has
become most women’s lives, unprotected by laws and totally at the mercy of some legally
authorized male figure in their entourage: brother, father, or husband. The masterful structure
takes these pathetic women through a sort of relay race, each new character taking over from the
previous one.
Most of these women are the poorest of the poor, several just out of jail where they were
thrown for unspecified crimes and misdemeanors. They are not only legitimately afraid to
breathe in a world ruled by men but they are on the street with no one to turn to. They crouch
behind cars, they hide in doorways, they scramble for a name, a telephone number, for someone
who could lend a helping hand, a shelter, food, some money. One woman is pregnant and needs
an abortion. But no one will help. The only friendly faces are those of other women like
themselves who have managed to get their own bearings. They can be friendly but they don’t
have anything to give.
Unwittingly or not, Panahi brings home a great truth about oppressive societies: The
oppressor is as much a prisoner as the oppressed—as uncomfortable if not as threatened. The
circle is not only that shown in the film but that of oppression feeding the harshness feeding the
oppression. In a society where people are just a great mass, a glob of something, particles stuck
together only with the glue of religion, compassion, understanding, and respect have no meaning.
People are to do as they are told, period. They have ceased existing even if they still breathe.
What is remarkable about ―The Circle‖ is not its excellence, its smooth cinematography, the
acting so natural that watching the film is like opening a door on these people’s lives–after all,
many Iranian directors have accustomed us to no less–but the fact that this and other films to
come out of Iran–but not always, as in the present case, shown inside Iran–continue to make their
way abroad where they reap prizes and awards, and to make their way to theaters abroad.
It cannot only be a fashion. That the Iranian cinema is hot is not enough. When one knows
the hassles, the almost impossibility of obtaining the least permission from the corrupt,
incompetent administration tied up in rules and regulations that only greasing the right palm will
push aside, it seems incredible that any film at all would ever get made. If you can imagine, there
is a hurdle simply at every step, and the amount of perseverance it takes to hear a thousand boro
farda bia (―come back tomorrow‖) to get past censorship and to obtain authorization, financing,
and, sometimes, distribution, is such that none but the most energetic or demented would put up
with it until achieving a finished product.
Things may be slightly easier in the case of Panahi, given the fame he obtained with ―The
White Balloon.‖ It shows the bankrupt, corrupt, vile system—or lack thereof—where the female
half of the population is simply nothing, where the birth of a female child is insulting to the
family of the father, where a little girl is best abandoned in the street than be a constant reminder
of the mother’s utter failure to fill her only function, produce a male. (One might ask Islamic
scholars, what would happen to the world if only boys were born? Would all fathers be ecstatic,
until the race disappeared?)
The film starts with a metal trap-door opened and closed in a hospital. It ends with a metal
trap-door opened and closed in a jail. Between the two, the suffering of these pathetic black-
chadored ghosts who haunt the streets at night, in search of anyone who could help. But who
can?
The Islamic laws in vigor under this religious republic forbid pretty much everything to
women: traveling—including domestic travel by bus—getting a room at a hotel, having an
abortion, signing a lease on a house, picking a school for her children, anything at all, for which
she does not have the express authorization of one of the male figures cited above. That is all she
can do. So yes, there are professional women who hold jobs, there are political women (though
in one comical instance, when a journalist called the home of a woman representative in the
Iranian parliament, the husband picked up and said he didn’t allow his wife to be interviewed.
She is allowed to run for public office and sit on the bench next to hundreds of men, but her
husband, in the sanctity of his home, is the one who makes the decisions.)
Of course, the laws for the protection of families, active under the Shah, are all obsolete. A
man can divorce his wife by snapping his fingers, he can bring in other wives as long as he can
support them, and so on. Until recently, he could discard any unwanted wife by pronouncing the
ritual formula, throwing her out on the street without any right except to keep her children until a
certain age. Again until recently, the legal age for marriage for a female was nine. It has now
been pushed to fifteen.
Is this a great country or what? Well, as long as it keeps producing films such as ―The
Circle,‖ all hope is not lost.