SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: It’s a sign of the sheer guts, determination and creative energy of Iranian filmmakers that just as state repression tightens against the sector (viz, the jailing and banning from professional work of one of the nation’s most internationally celebrated filmmakers, Jafar Panahi), they not only refuse to give up, but continue to critique their society with renewed vigour while finding new aesthetic strategies to achieve this.
The film serves as a clarion call to other Iranian filmmakers not to give up, not to opt for a comfortable lifestyle and forget the social disadvantage and injustice around them.
This story, centred on a husband and wife working in the film industry, is a vibrant example of the new aesthetic emerging in Iranian cinema: relatively fast-paced, with lots of mobile camera-work and a vivid feeling for life in the streets, and a sharp awareness of class issues. That it has already been banned in Iran, no doubt for its critique of Iranian patriarchy and legal (in)justice is sadly par for the course.
Sahar (played by the film’s writer/director Niki Karimi) and her husband Saman (Shahab Hosseini) are filmmakers living a privileged existence as members of the trendy middle class. Near the beginning we see them visiting the under-construction apartment for which they’ve put down a deposit, excitedly looking to their cosy future.
He works as a director for a televison series with a fast turnaround time, and also makes rock videos. His wife is a producer with a background in documentary. But crisis enters their lives when he realises he needs to quickly reshoot a scene in his series because it portrays a woman committing suicide - something he’s not allowed to show on screen – and finds the actress hard to track down.
As Saman and Sahar set out to find the missing woman, it seems as if Final Whistle is turning into a simple 'quest’ story along similar narrative tramlines to Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, in which a girl’s modest goal (to buy a goldfish) effectively became an epic journey. But at around the 25-minute mark something unexpected occurs. The pair catches up with their actress – who has been in hospital having a liver removed – and the story spins off into a new direction.
This review is going to be discreet about exactly what they find (readers wanting to avoid spoilers entirely are advised to avoid the festival’s program notes). However it’s probably not giving away too much to reveal that their actress and her family are caught in a viciously unfair web of circumstance, one in which male violence and the powerlessness of women are bolstered by the might of a theocratic judicial system. The woman’s plight – made worse by her low-class status and lack of money – starkly contrasts with the filmmaking couple’s upholstered existence.
This method of switching of goals mid-stream, so that the film turns out not to be what it initially looked like it was going to be about, also helped to distinguish Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, last year’s winner of the Sydney Film Festival’s official competition and later the first Iranian film to win the Academy Award for foreign language film. That film’s title and opening scenes made it seem as if it would be a story about divorce – until events wrenched it into an unexpected direction.
While filmed in a much breezier style than we’ve been used to seeing in Iranian cinema, this film essentially continues the blend of social realism with self-reflexivity practised by older Iranian directors such as Abbas Kiarostami, it just does it in a different way. Final Whistle (the title a reference to the soccer World Cup, which takes place during the period of the story) has two filmmakers as its leading characters for a good reason.
The film serves as a clarion call to other Iranian filmmakers not to give up, not to opt for a comfortable lifestyle and forget the social disadvantage and injustice around them. If at times it can be a bit didactic (and the plot set-up a bit hard to believe), its vigour and passion give it real power.
