‘No Bears’ review: From Iran, a master class in house-arrest filmmaking from Jafar Panahi


Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Fri, January 20, 2023

The facts are stark.

In 2010, discouraged at one of its native artist’s insistence on pushing boundaries and making Iran look less than ideal on film, the Iranian government slapped writer-director Jafar Panahi with a 20-year ban on moviemaking. He was also confined to within Iran itself, with no travel beyond its borders.

Last July, after the completion of his fifth clandestine feature project in 12 years, Panahi was imprisoned just before Iran’s civil unrest and mass protests boiled over, for a time. The director is to serve up to six years. “No Bears,” that bracing fifth act of creative defiance, opens Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

How does an artist with a camera keep going under those conditions? An ingenious, subtly anguished answer to that question, Panahi’s film is both an act of self-assessment, with the filmmaker assuming the role of himself, and a crafty drama of suspense, identity and the perils of what we do for love.

In the first scene, we’re in a Turkish city near the Iranian border. On a busy urban street full of vendors’ cries and stray cats and dogs, tea shop server Zara (Mina Kavani) and her partner Bakhtiar (Bakhtiyar Panjeei) are arranging a life-altering plan to slip across the border with phony passports.

Then: “Cut!” This, we learn, is a movie being made, not life being lived. Remotely, from the Iranian border village where he has come to spend time under state lockdown, director Panahi observes the production in progress (and, at other times, the daily footage on a hard drive) on his laptop, as he struggles with wonky Wi-Fi and a feeling of profound dislocation.

Panahi has come from Tehran to this village to make his movie, or at least supervise from a distance. The amiable village citizen (Vahid Mobasheri) from whom he has rented a room agrees to film a ceremonial foot-washing on Panahi’s behalf outside of town, part of an engagement celebration. Meantime, Panahi takes still photographs of his neighbors, and some of the townspeople, at one point — as we hear later — capturing the image of a young man and woman under a tree.

That woman, it turns out, is engaged to someone else. “No Bears” takes the notion of a dangerous witness with a lens to a fascinating and finally chilling conclusion. Panahi, never trusted by the locals, becomes their obvious scapegoat and prime adversary. The least he must do, the initially sympathetic town sheriff says, is take an oath in the hallowed traditional “Swear Room” that he did not photograph the couple — no evidence, no problem, at least for the man with the camera.

Yet nothing is simple or forgiving in this land. The movie shifts planes of reality with uncanny effectiveness; one minute, the film-within-a-film is developing legitimate narrative momentum, only to be shifted, radically, to the story of the actors playing those characters, who share their predicament.

Some of “No Bears,” which takes its title from the local fib that bears roam the area, is unaccountably beautiful. As Panahi drives at night in his conspicuously swank SUV along dusty border roads, more than dust hangs in the air, which is thick with tension. Is he about to make a run across? Is the temptation too great? Or is the fear greater?

The accepted folkloric lie about the bears exemplifies a nation’s fear, where it is all too easy, as the actor Bakhtiar says, to feel “trapped, with no future, no freedom and no job.” Another character puts it this way: “Our fear empowers others.” Those are sentiments, to be sure, that the Iranian censors and their overlords do not like. And while “No Bears” was completed before his current imprisonment, this is why Panahi is behind bars.

In “This is Not a Film,” Panahi stayed close and mostly inside his apartment, and the intimacy of his essayistic documentary was rare indeed. That film allegedly was smuggled out of Iran inside a cake, before premiering at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. “No Bears” is a far more expansive work, shot in two countries (!) with a clear sense of where it’s going every minute — even when the fictional/factual iteration of Panahi, played by Panahi, arrives at one vexing, no-win crossroads after another.

“No Bears” — 4 stars (out of 4)

No MPAA rating (some violence)

Running time: 1:47

How to watch: Jan. 20-26 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune