| Author |
Topic: The Mirror |
grant
Operative |
posted December 17, 1999 01:56 PM
  
OK, I just saw this Iranian gem last night and need to know if
anyone else saw it. It's been doing the film festival circuit (I saw
it as part of a movie club thing that I speak at every so
often).
It's REALLY invisible.
I mean it was made under the
noses of one of the most repressive regimes on Earth and it's
totally subversive.
If you're not told the filmmaker is into
political allegory, it kind of falls down into a boring
pseudo-verite thing. It's by the same guy who made The White
Balloon.
The story: a little girl (with, it must be allowed, an incredibly
annoying voice) is waiting for her mother to pick her up after
school and she never arrives. Little girl tries to get home through
the confusing hustle of modern Teheran.
It gets a little boring
about 40 minutes into it. Then, something bizarre happens. The six
year old actress quits.
She decides she's going to walk home from
the set.
They leave the mike on her -- and follow her through
the streets of the city.
It's a total headfuck. I still can't
tell what was scripted or if she was in on it or not. But the
conversations she gets involved in -- just asking old ladies and
cops for directions, mind you -- run the gamut. There's a lot of
feminism and youth culture and it's all either (obvious) background
or subtext.
It can get a little grating, but it had me laughing in disbelief
more than once.
Anyone else see it?
|
JackFrost
Operative |
posted December 17, 1999 06:32 PM
That sounds fucking brilliant!
I'll bet it's nice and slow and boring for 40 minutes so the
fucks who'd censor it would turn it off and permit it to pass...
Is it out in the States?
|
Twig the Wonder Kid
Operative |
posted December 18, 1999 05:57 PM
I'm not familiar with 'The Mirror' or 'The White Balloon' but your
description of it reminds me of the kind of stuff Bertrand Blier
plays with in his films.
Do you know any more about the director, grant?
|
grant
Operative |
posted December 18, 1999 08:31 PM
The Mirror was just at the Ft. Lauderdale film festival in late
October. I can't recall the director's name offhand, but he's the
Big Iranian Filmmaker who I think was mentioned in National
Geographic a few months ago.
Just looked him up on the imdb:
Jafar Panahi.
I should warn you that the irritation factor is pretty high in
this movie. It's just got some pretty funky rebellion payoffs,
specially if you take a symbolic reading of it.
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