One film which stood out at Cannes earlier this year has found a similar success at London. This gentle film, as one critic put it, offers more than meets the eye, and therefore serves as an antidote to a mainstreamn cinema which seems to offer the opposite.
The patriarch of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami, returned home one day to find a message from Jafar Panahi asking him for work on the set of his next film. Kiarostami made Panahi his assistant on Through the Olive Trees, and the friendship that developed led Kiarostami to write the screenplay for his protégé. Panahi is not only indebted to his mentor for the screenplay, but has embraced many of Kiarostami's methods and directing techniques.
The White Balloon recounts the story of seven-year-old Razieh, a young Iranian girl who wants to buy a fish for Tehran's New Year's Day [March 21] celebration. Given her mother's last bit of cash, Razieh sets out into the crowded city streets, and loses not only the banknote, but herself in an odyssey peppered with jugglers, snake charmers and the Afghan Balloon seller.
Played by Aïda Mohammedkhani, Razieh's refrain - "I wanted to see what it was that was not good for me to watch" - is, in part, autobiographical; Panahi as a child would sneak into the movies that his father had forbidden him to see. But in The White Balloon, the director uses the expression to draw the audience into seeing life through Razieh's eyes, the curiosity of children which leads to the "discovery and meaning of life". Panahi shares with Kiarostami the habit of keeping the cast of actors and, particularly, non-actors in the dark about a storyline. "To maintain the element of surprise and the attraction of each scene, so that the natural, instantaneous and spontaneous aspect of their acting is preserved," elaborates Panahi. "There is nothing like the freshness of first takes to avoid the systematic, artificial and repetitive side of things".
TIM AVIS
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