Mumbai Film Festival ’13 Review: Closed Curtain (2013) Original Iranian Title - Pardé

Directed By: Jafar Panahi & Kambuzia Partovi

Jafar Panahi, the embattled Iranian director of acclaimed works like The Circle (2000), Crimson Gold (2003), Offside (2006) and This Is Not A Film (2011), is currently battling the despotic Iranian regime which has handed him a 6 year jail term (which he awaits under house arrest) and a 20 year ban on film-making, chaining his artistic impulses and deeply depressing this great artist who was said to be contemplating suicide at one point. He has nevertheless managed to make a second film from his captivity (the first being This Is Not A Film).

Closed Curtains is bigger in scope (relatively) to This Is Not A Film and almost has something resembling a plot or a narrative which sets it apart from its cousin This Is Not A Film which is considered a documentary. But the scope, as stated, is bigger only by comparison, this film also takes place competently within a house. There are some exterior shots but they are from the terrace or the windows of the house and Panahi does stage atleast one memorable exterior sequence through his window!

The house in question is the sea side 3 story holiday retreat of Panahi and as such offers a larger setting and more variety of scenery simply by the fact of there being more rooms to shoot in than his city apartment which he used in This Is Not A Film. Thus the house is a potent enough setting for a chamber piece and that is exactly how the film develops. At first.

Beginning with an extended take of a still camera looking out through a barricaded window as a screenwriter arrives with provisions at the holiday retreat of a friend, the subject of artists in hiding and captivity immediately raises its head with the arriving writer a probable stand in for Mr Panahi himself.

The reason for his hiding is soon revealed to be not his writing but his dog which he cannot part with as dogs are being rounded up and killed in the city where he lives. The writer’s routine is charted in fluid long takes by Panahi, his film-making acumen not dulled it seems by infrequent use. A wrench is thrown in this peaceful scenario by the arrival of a woman on the edge who is also supposedly in hiding! Panahi even manages moments of comedy from this bizarrely surreal scenario.

But just as he did in This Is Not A Film, where Panahi began staging his script by putting tape marks on the carpet and describing the film he could not make, he here preempts this story just as he preempted that attempt after despairing about its futility. The narrative which does become fairly interesting as it enfolds as a two hander between the writer (Kambozia Partovi, also the co-director) and Melika (Maryam Moqadam) dissipates away as the film dissolves into the real life story of Mr. Panahi arriving at his holiday retreat to spend a few days. What happened earlier was probably a film as imagined by Mr. Panahi which starts to haunt Mr. Panahi as the two stories, the story of the film he imagined and the story of his life occupy the same house and begin to collide and intermingle and blur. It expresses the directors need to let his stories let out of himself or he’s haunted by them. In keeping with his supposed state of mind during filming, Melika is a suicidal character who might or might not be successful in her suicide attempt, staged in a virtuoso long take by Mr. Panahi.

The restrictions on his creativity has led Mr. Panahi to be more experimental than he perhaps might have been had he been making straight films with freedom. As in This Is Not A Film, here Mr. Panahi experiments with shooting on an iPhone and the meta-narrtive technique of cutting between two cameras looking at each other, much like in his previous film and famously originated in Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929). The film shot digitally, is still handsomely made, and its narrative portions stand up to any other film being made today. 

As the narrative of the film sputters out, the film is best seen as another statement by Mr. Panahi about his condition though he seems happier than he did in This Is Not A Film. The award for Best Screenplay at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival is not entirely without merit through one senses that Mr. Panahi’s situation might have had much to do with it.

But the film is definitely worth seeing, if for nothing else then just for experiencing Mr. Panahi’s film-making pending a full blown narrative feature by him, which sadly might not arrive for 20 years hence.

3.5/5