Mark Reviews Movies: NO BEARS

No Bears, Janus Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 12, 2023

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who still is technically under a ban from making movies in his native country, has made yet another film. Ever since the Iranian government legally barred him from leaving the country and practicing his art, Panahi has been testing the waters and pushing the limits of that sentence. That continues in No Bears, obviously, as the director plays himself, shows himself indirectly directing a different movie, and literally straddles the line of the travel ban implemented against him.

It feels dangerous for the filmmaker, and even as Panahi plays with restrictions set upon him, he begins to acknowledge that fact more and more as this story progresses. Panahi has proven that he can't and won't be stopped by external forces, and that's commendable and courageous beyond such meager sentiments of admiration. Here, though, Panahi questions how his insistence to continue making movies could affect others.

The plot within Panahi's screenplay has the director stationed in a small village near the Iranian border with Turkey. He's currently overseeing the production of a movie in Tehran via video conferencing, which might be a form of plausible deniability for him, a way to further protect his actors/subjects, or both. The movie being shot in the city with an on-site crew is about Bakhtiar (Bakhityar Panjeei) and Zara (Mina Kavani), a married couple who are conspiring to flee Iran. Just from that detail, both the real Panahi and his on-screen version seem to be tempting trouble with the whole project.

Meanwhile, the fictional Panahi is trying to fit in and not attract too much attention in the village, called Joban. This is impossible, of course. People know of him. They know of his legal problems. If someone knows nothing of the man or his situation, there's no missing his nice car, which stands out from the vehicles belonging to the locals and particularly on the desert roads, where smugglers of illegal goods and of people speed along in trucks at night and keep an eye out for visitors on backroads that more or less belong to them.

Almost from the start, Panahi establishes a couple of potential underlying threats to himself and others—from the particulars of the movie being shot in Tehran, to how inescapably recognizable he is in the village, to the mounting realization that the whole project in the city might be some kind of excuse for something far more real. Despite all of that, though, the filmmaker keeps things light. Much of the on-screen Panahi's story amounts to a comedy of manners, in which he tries to balance his own standards with the customs of the village.

It all begins with complete innocence and coincidence, as the in-movie Panahi has internet troubles, asks for help from the rental house's landlord Ghanbar (Vahid Mobasheri), and learns about a pre-wedding ritual happening at the nearby river. After enlisting Ghanbar to record footage of the ceremony, Panahi snaps some photos of the village and its inhabitants.

The real issue here seems to be what's actually happening on the movie Panahi is directing in an unofficially official capacity, as it becomes clear Bakhtiar and Zara aren't merely actors, the movie isn't entirely fictional, and their desire to obtain fake passports and find a way out of Iran is very real. That setup leads to a nighttime drive in the desert, where movie crewmember Reza (Reza Heydari) suggests Panahi could leave Iran himself by way of a similar route. After all, he is standing exactly on the border at that exact moment. One cannot help but admire Panahi's gumption in that scene, as if he's daring someone to use the footage at a court proceeding against him. Whether it's real or not, of course, is a big part of Panahi's game.

The whole of this section of the plot feels especially consequential, and as we learn more about Bakhtiar and Zara's efforts to flee and the complications that arise in the process, it's particularly affecting. Panahi, of course, is merely an observer, not only as a filmmaker trying to capture reality or the approximate semblance of it, but also in his physical distance from those proceedings. Could he be more helpful to two people in need if not for those circumstances?

His intentional separation from these events might contribute to what happens in that subplot, but his accidental participation in the goings-on in the village turns out to be just as troublesome, if more amusingly so. Panahi becomes caught up in a love triangle between a young man who is arranged to marry a particular young woman in the village and another young man, who loves said woman and whom is loved by her, too. As the village's chief (played by Naser Hashemi) tries to get at the truth of an alleged meeting and an alleged photograph Panhi might have taken of that meeting, the director becomes entangled in an increasingly absurd web of etiquette, tradition, oaths, and doing just about anything to keep order and the peace.

There's no winning either way for Panahi, the character who is only barely distinguishable from the real-life filmmaker. If that's the case in the semi-fictionalized world and circumstances of No Bears, what does that say about the real filmmaker's role of trying to make a difference without getting into trouble? Despite the film's relative simplicity of narrative, it becomes a deep and considered act of self-reflection, and maybe Panahi pushes the lines so much here because he's realizing how constricting those lines have become on him as an artist and a human being.

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