Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Offside / Iran / 2006

The way Panahi plays with off-screen space — we’re penned in along with these girl soccer fans and their guards, unable to see the match, only hear it — is a brilliantly simple device to make his sociological point. The only problem is there’s not enough to sustain a full-length feature, and when we leave the stadium post-match for the confines of the police van, the original force of the film goes astray as the story meanders off.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
08 Jan 2008 12:48 PM | Comments (3)

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1. leo / 10 January 2008 / 1:02 PM / URL

   You really think so? Meandering seems to me an often natural result of Panahi’s style and especially of the way this film seems to have been shot. But even so this felt quite tightly controlled to me. (Crimson Gold, a fully scripted and no doubt excellent film, seems to me far more meandering and a good deal less pointed in its intentions than this.) And even if there is a certain sense of (deliberate) confinement in the police van (as in that tantalizing shot of the match on TV in the cafe, as seen from the perspective of the girls in the van), the exhilaration and release of the conclusion only intensified the force of the rest of the film, at least for me. I found it especially thrilling that, like the earlier stadium chase scene, Panahi seems to have filmed this sequence during the actual event it’s purportedly dramatizing. It had me practically skipping out of the theater, and — believe you me — I don’t skip that often.

2. leo / 10 January 2008 / 1:10 PM / URL

   I should also note that, as much as I love Persepolis, it is a minor tragedy that Offside didn’t receive nearly as much popular attention. It is a good deal more politically interesting and — no joke — about as much of crowd-pleaser.

3. Ian / 10 January 2008 / 8:12 PM

   I meant by meandering – and I’d agree that the film, when in the stadium, is tightly controlled – was that the film went off on a tangent that (for me, at least) was a lot less interesting and less forceful than what had gone before (which had me almost skipping in my seat). Perhaps the “pointed intentions” are the problem for me – I certainly prefer Crimson Gold a lot more.