Closed Curtain

Part of what's so incredible about Jafar Panahi as a filmmaker is that it seems like he's only getting increasingly audacious with each new challenge. I have no interest in trying to articulate in words the strange, wonderful, challenging directions the film takes in its journey, but it's an important one. The walls of the home he's imprisoned in seem to, mostly figuratively, come crashing down; the ideas imprisoned in his mind from his ban on filmmaking are freed to flourish. The blurred line where fiction ends and truth starts has been a preoccupation in Iranian literary tradition for centuries, and continued by directors like Panahi for years, but now the harsh limitations set on his ability to express himself more inventively in narrative and experimentally in aesthetic — having the unintended consequence of advancing the form further. The film would have been forgiven for seeming more heavy-handed than usual as it did in its first half, seeing as how the urgency of his situation might have even necessitated more bluntness, but by the end Jafar Panahi has utterly annihilated any semblance of conventionality, simple-mindedness or easiness. And, even setting his particular circumstances aside (though partly as a result of it), the final product is a staggering achievement.