2006: Offside

Offside (2006, Panahi) 8/10

In 2005, during a World Cup Qualifier between Asian football powerhouses Iran and Japan, seven individuals died during a melee at Tehran's Azadi Stadium. When Iranian officials disclosed the names of the deceased to the general public, the identities of only six of the seven were revealed. News agencies speculated that the seventh death was that of a woman who had entered the Azadi Stadium disguised as a man.

The enigmatic nature of the seventh victim centers upon the complex nature of Iranian sports. In Iran, women are barred from attending live male sports. Until April 2006, the dream of female fans to view their favourite players such as Ali Karimi or Mehdi Mahdavikia beyond their living rooms was an illegal act. Yet, this pre-World Cup legislation designed to open up Iranian football to women, restricts attendance to married women: subsequently eliminating the participation of countless numbers of single women, teenagers, girls and elderly widows.

The absurd nature of this law is the crux of Jafar Panahi's film Offside: a verité style social critique disguised as a satirical comedy. Banned in his native Iran, Panahi's film is a carefully planed docu-comedy shot during Iran's penultimate World Cup qualifier against Bahrain in late 2005. Focusing on half a dozen women between the ages of 16-24, Panahi's film explores their attempts to gain entry into the illegal world of professional male sports. Disguised as soldiers, visually impaired teenagers and poster-bearing boys, the women each attempt to assimilate into the crowd and sneak into the Azadi.

Yet, Iran's Revolutionary Guard units have been informed to carefully monitor the spectators and extract any unwanted female fans from the over 100,000 individuals attending the game. Rounding them together in a rectangular prison constructed of crash barriers, the soldiers manage to find six women ranging from chain-smoking tomboys to shy introverts. Engaging in philosophical banter, the urbanite women mock and challenge their provincial captors: inquisitively dissecting the implications of their attendance and the discriminatory rhetoric their society upholds.

In Offside, Panahi cleverly creates a reflective microcosm. Setting almost the entire film within the Azadi Stadium, Panahi constructs a film as much a critique of social injustice, as it is a dynamic observation of the passions stirred by sport. Clad in Iranian colours and singing patriotic songs, Panahi's characters are unlikely dissenting figures. Their mere presence at the stadium is a sign of rebellion, despite their uncompromised adoration for their homeland. Thus, nationalist loyalties are not questioned in Panahi's film, but the women's collective disavowal of Iran's strict theocratic laws.

The arousal of these sentiments through sport is expertly achieved in Offside. Awash in jingoism, the majority of sports films miss the emotional resonance attached to games. Despite showing barely any footage of the Iran-Bahrain match, Panahi creates quite possibly the best film ever made about football. Restricting his footage to action unhinged from the mis-en-scene, Panahi allows sport to be the backdrop of the film, rather than a collection of morose intercuttings. When an elderly man arouses a fight on a bus headed to the stadium, Panahi avoids the obvious.

Rather than have the dispute be produced due to perjorative remarks about players, the man's mere decision to enter the stadium is an act of defiance. Not even age or ill health will prevent him. When the other passengers inform him of the benefits of watching the game on state television, the man describes the necessity of attending the match: musing on the communal nature of the event, the ability to speak his mind and the emotional brutality of the event itself. Addressing these concepts early in the film, Panahi is then able to utilize this template in relation to his female protaganists.

The aura of gender apartheid explored in Panahi's film is packaged in a humanistic tone, which is accessible and digestable. Panahi's subtleness enhances the picture through conversations brimming with the follies of human nature. Enclosed in their crash barrier pen, the six women are rounded up like cattle awaiting the verbal slaughter of the stadium's chief officer. Through their conversations with the soldiers, new perspectives are emitted. As one soldier openly remarks observing the six detained women is the last thing he wishes to engage in. Desperate to end his mandatory service in the army, the provincial young man dreams of returning home to harvest his mother's ailing farm. Other soldiers ring their jealous girlfriends or clamour for a glimpse of the action through the wrought iron gates next to the pen, inaccurately relaying the events to the information-starved prisoners.

Their sympathies with the women are closeted by their own needs. Failure to properly detain the women could endanger their future career prospects or extend their service. Using aggressive wit and logic, one of the women disputes the logic of the law: noting that Iranian women can attend films alongside men and that Japanese women were able to attend Iran's earlier qualifier with Japan. The soldier's awkward attempts to justify the laws fall flat, causing him to increasingly relate to his captives. The amusing hijinks of one soldier's attempts to escort another female to a male washroom delienates the baffling nature of the government's misogynistic policies: forcing the woman to wear an Ali Karimi poster around her head, while the soldier tries in vain to clear a graffiti-strewn washroom of its occupants. However, as Panahi observes in his poignant and expressive finale: sport is a unifier through which celebration bears no resentment based on sex, class, race or relgion.

By working within this absurd satirical edge, Panahi creates a film more memorable and brilliant than a simplified demonization. The political narrative underlying Offside exposes the threadbare properties soldering together a discriminatory set of laws: proposing new questions, while distinguishing ordinary Iranian citizens from the retroactive ideological constructs which ultimately surpresses them and their answers. Working within the Iranian New Wave's typical Neo-Realist influenced program, Panahi utilizes his non-professional actors and real locations brilliantly: compacting an actual live event into an almost real-time docu-comedy. Furthermore, he explores to great effect the democratizing qualities of sport, which can become forums for free speech, gender equality and classless interaction.

One of the best of 2006

* Offside is available on R2 DVD through Artficial Eye

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1967: Weekend

Weekend (Godard, 1967) 8/10


- Didn’t you hear what he said? Marx says we’re all brothers! (Corinne)
- Marx didn’t say that. Some other communist said that. Jesus said that (Roland)

What a rotten film, all we meet are crazy people (Roland)

On a warm summer Friday, bourgeois couple Roland (Jean Yanne) and Corinne (Mireille Darc) prepare for a weekend trip to visit Corinne's mother in the country. But this is no ordinary visit. For five years, they have been poisoning Corinne's father's food in an attempt to collect his life insurance. With his death in sight, the couple plan to intimidate Corinne's mother into giving them more than their alloted share.

On the road to Corinne's mother's estate in Oinville, the couple come across an extensive car crash; prompting them to careen and twist amidst the cacophony of horns through the debris of mutilated bodies, burning cars and eccentric characters playing cards, tossing beach balls and drinking wine to pass the time. Oblivious to the events around them, Roland and Corinne are slow to discern that the world around them has changed, prompting them to belatedly ponder whether they are still in reality or part of a film.

Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend is one of cinema's most incendiary and political pieces. While its overt sloganeering is dated, Weekend is still one of cinema's most adventurous and biting black comedies. Filmed at the beginning of his period of blatant anti-commercial cinema, Godard's attitude toward traditional modes of cinema can be summed up in his final credits which read: End of Film. End of Cinema.

With its radical chic, Weekend was representative of both Godard's own immersion into the avant-garde, as well as a shift in 60's (particularly Europrean) cinema towards counter-culture, anti-narrative and "conscious" cinema in films such as Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up and Federico Fellini's 8½. While in North America, this trend would only gain mainstream signficance upon the release of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, this movement was alive and kicking throughout world cinema's new wave movements.

This emphasis on consciously deconstructing cinema is prevalent in Weekend. Structurally, Godard playfully tinkers with the medium's most orthodox elements such as inserting dramatic swells of music at inappropriate moments, placing intertitles with revolutionary slogans and utilizing non-linear editing. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard uses slow tracking shots and long takes that increasingly become shot from further distances as the surroundings become less familiar to present-day reality. Additionally he uses Brechtian dramatic techniques by having his character's consciously break the "fourth wall" between performers and audience:. This is notable in scene in which revolutionally-aligned Middle Eastern and African garbage men speak to the camera about the state of the third world in Marxian socio-economic language. Several other instances are found when Roland and Corinne question the cinematic nature of "reality."

"Reality" itself in Weekend is a misnomer. As a film focusing more on cinematic and political ideas than narrative concerns, Weekend is a surrealist evocation of radical politics in the style of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. With its radical leftist sympathies, Godard's film is drenched in Marxian and Gramscian debates over class struggle, political and cultural hegemony and the crass materialism of the bourgeoisie. Yet, in a recent interview with Andrew Sarris, the pioneering director claimed that he never was a committed Marxist, but rather used the ideology's provactive nature to dissect the social and political concerns of the time. Additional viewings of Weekend slightly corrolate with this position, as Marx's philosophies still have support in a post-structuralist dominated academe.

And while Godard espouses these radical philopshies in Weekend and his later films with radical cinema collective Dziga Vertov, the film's nature as an ironic and surreal black comedy seems to undermine previous critical attempts to pidgeonhole Weekend as a distinctly Marxist film. Given Godard's predilection with the then fashionable cause of Maoism, Weekend focuses more on the agency of agrarian peasants rather than industrial workers. Yet, Godard does not frame the peasants in a favourable life. They are posited as uneducated imbeciles who heartily sing atop their tractors, but lack the intellectual or economic capacity to run society.

Contrarily, the bourgeoisie are neither assumed to be responsbile enough for contemporary society. The middle-class characters in Weekend are petty, arrogant, immoral, reckless and materialistic: flamboyantly displaying their wealth and status. After being forced at gunpoint to pick-up a hitchhiker who grants wishes, the couple's suggestions are all purely object-oriented such as weapons, an evening with James Bond and dresses. Similarly, when Roland and Corinne's reckless driving gets the better of them, resulting in a fiery crash, Corinne's only concern is the loss of her Hermes handbag.

Throughout Weekend, the film's bourgeois members are continually shown to be ignorant of the changes around them; thus heightening their disturbed response to these shifts upon their belated realization. Furthermore, they are constantly shown as bored. When listening to two garbage men discuss politics, Roland and Corinne pass each other cigarettes in order to fill their lethargic void. Furthermore, each of them openly engages in adulterous affairs; with Corinne telling her lover an erotic adulterous story of a menage a trois in order to arouse him.

The violence within human nature and modern life in also shown in Corinne and Roland's actions: running other motorists and cyclists off the road, fantasizing of murdering Corinne's mother and standing emotionless while others are raped, killed or beaten. When other characters refuse to offer them assistance, they engage in acts of theft and violence in order to pursue their selfish aims such as their attack on another middle-class man (Jean Pierre Leaud) singing to his children on a rural telephone, who refuses to drive them to Oinville in his sports car.

The abrasive and careless nature of the bourgeoisie is apparent when Roland and Corinne enter a quaint village, only for class distinctions to become heightened when a gruff farmer crashes his tractor into a young couple recklessly speeding in their Triumph convertible. Pejorative language and accusations are thrown around as the woman proclaims the working classes are "pissed off because we fuck in the Riveria and you don't...", only for the farmer to retort "If it weren't for me and my tractor, the French would have nothing to eat" But when Corinne and Roland refuse to drive neither part to Oinville for help, the two warring classes unite in what Godard's intertitle asserts is a "Phony Graph."

This aforementioned sequence is a rare instance of harmony in Weekend in which contemporary society devolves into anarchy and chaos: a post-apocalyptic world in which the products of industry are scattered and strewn in fields. From the film's opening moments, society slowly erupts into an orgy of death and destruction; that results in cannablist Maoist guerillas stalking the countryside. Thus, rather than being a purely didactic Marxist film Weekend is more or less a critique of contemporary society's dissolution into violence and savagery. Although released in December 1967, Weekend is the visual template for 1968: arguably the most radical and violent year of the post-WWII era. It is in this year of assassinations, student protests, war and repression that Weekend's apocalyptic vision holds true in its animated and extremist surreal outlook on society.

In Weekend Godard does not appear to prescribe revolution, but rather shows the aggressive flaws within modern society. Thus, when Godard includes several real and imagined figures from the Enlightenment and Romantic eras such as Emily Brönte, Tom Thumb, St. Just (Jean Pierre Leaud) and Joseph Balsamo, he appears to be satirically critiquing a society which has purged these elements inquiring into the nature of truth from its schema. When characters ponder the origins of civilization or question the nature of reality in Weekend, Godard seems to be suggesting the artificial nature of modern life and a need to restore organic elements of life. Unlike Roland's belief that life is film, Godard seems to assert that life is not cinema, but rather one which addresses and rectifies the violent tendecies of human nature; in order to avoid the type of surrealist apocalypse the film proposes.

* Weekend is avaiable on R2 DVD by Artifical Eye and on R1 DVD by New Yorker Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque