New York Dispatch. 2.

As the New York Film Festival begins, I'll recommend one film rather than weigh in on the opening night gala or any general themes.

The title of Offside by Jafar Panahi conjures up a sports metaphor. On the most literal-minded level, the metaphor is apt - Panahi is looking at girl soccer fans disguised as boys at a Tehran stadium, detained by soldiers who prevent them from watching a game between Iran and Bahrain that eventually takes Iran, the victor, to the World Cup. It's literally apt and poignant as it follows those girls from their cleverly conceived (and concealed) entry into the stadium, to their confrontation with the soldiers who detain them, to their celebration of the team's victory as a bus takes the "offenders" to a jail run by the Vice Squad. It also reveals layers of insight into the Iraq regime's domination of its citizens, and into the rationalizations that citizens make for their own circumstances.

Panahi is working here the way he has in The Circle, about women working as street prostitutes, and Crimson Gold, about a pizza delivery man turned robber and murderer - no stars, no professional actors, no shooting permits. As always, his stories are about outsiders whose very lives violate the rigid laws of the Islamic Republic. In this case, girls are banned from attending soccer games. It's as simple as that - until they start asking their enforcers questions about it and an oblique political conversation begins. Most women dutifully stay away. The intrepid ones dress as boys with baseball caps and paint their faces in the colors of the national flag. Some make it in after scalping tickets at extortionate prices. We meet the ones who never see the game, or those who are arrested when someone spots them. They're kept outside by soldiers who pen them into a small corner of concrete on the perimeter of the stadium for the duration of the game. One who wore a soldier's uniform and found her way to seats for officials is in handcuffs the entire time. (Why not just take them away?)

Panahi begins his film on a bus traveling grey monotonous streets to the game, where an anguished father is searching for his daughter and planning to give her a beating for breaking the rules. (He doesn't find her, but he will later.) We follow that girl (unnamed, as all the characters are) through the boisterous crowd outside the stadium where she's arrested and taken to the detention pen.

Then the battle of words begins. The girls ask a soldier guarding them to explain why they can't be allowed in. The young man from the provinces is no match for the city girls who laugh at his comments. Once he's ridiculed for his response that women simply shouldn't attend games with men, he simply admits to them that he would rather be back in his village, caring for his mother and taking cows to pasture. From time to time, there's the reminder that a good beating will keep girls and women in line. The girls are undeterred and emboldened. They point out that Japanese women were permitted to watch when Iran played Japan, and note that women can sit in cinemas - dark rooms! - with men.

Not to overplay the obvious metaphors, but Panahi is presenting Iranian women unveiled. Not uncovered, since they're in boys' clothes. No one's claiming that these fans represent all Iranian women - a claim that would be far too abstract or didactic for a filmmaker of  Panahi's refinement - yet there's a determination and a women's solidarity here that the regime surely isn't going to welcome. You'll be struck by the earthiness of what they say. There's nothing like the right jeer to deflate pomposity.

Of course, what's really unveiled is also Iran, especially its interior divisions between urban and rural, men and women, old and young, military and civilian, religious and irreverent. No mention is made of the government, of God, or of the United States. The enemy here is Bahrain, on the field. The enemy is also the network of strictures that rule Iranians' lives which force Iranians to persecute themselves and each other.

That persecution is also a joke much of the time, even for the film's aggrieved girls, who do end up heading to jail, albeit singing on the way. It's best seen in a sequence where one of the detained girls begs to go to the bathroom. A soldier leads her to the men's room (there's no ladies' room), but not before he puts a mask over her face and he empties the toilets of one couple that seems to be gay, plus a long-haired man and a grandfather in a wheelchair who is suspected of doing something sinister in one of the stalls. The soldier then worries that his prisoner will be corrupted if she reads obscenities on the bathroom walls (what else would be up there, quotations from the Koran?), and he forces her to close her eyes, while a crowd of angry young men barred from toilet forms. If law breaks down into a free-for-all in the bathroom, what's next? Most of the long sequence is shot without a single edit - a masterful turn in an un-cinematic space, even for a director like Panahi who is drawn toward locations that seem anything but cinematic.

I've seen Offside three times now - in Berlin, Toronto and New York. Those who saw it in Berlin and Toronto were fortunate to have Jafar Panahi there to discuss his film. He won't be in New York, because he couldn't get a visa to visit the US. It's a pity. On an earlier passage through JFK airport, Panahi refused to be fingerprinted and was detained. This visible mistreatment which got him lots of press coverage may well endear him to the Iranian government. Let's hope that means his film will have a wide audience there. I'm not holding my breath. None of his films has been released in Iran so far.

Another note. The NYFF opens as a political farce in New York threatens to upstage it. Just yesterday, the press revealed that Jeanine Pirro, the Republican candidate for New York State Attorney General, is being investigated for planning to wiretap the boat of her husband, whom she suspected of having an affair. The alleged plot was discovered in another wiretap, this one on the phone of Bernard Kerik, the former and now-discredited NYC police commissioner, who withdrew from consideration as Bush's nominee for Homeland Security Secretary when news came out that Kerik had not only misused funds in the past, but also had mob ties. Kerik may now be best-known for his sexual trysts with the book editor Judith Regan in hotel rooms in lower Manhattan reserved for exhausted 9/11 firefighters. He's still under investigation. (Pirro has called for an investigation of the leaked information.) Their listening gambit already has a cinematic name, "The Love Bug." Remember, this woman is running for Attorney General of the State of New York.

Sound complicated? It gets messier. Pirro's libidinal husband, Al, with his own mob connections, already did prison time for tax evasion and fathered a child with another woman while married to his wife. Her opponent, Andrew Cuomo, is another cuckolded candidate, having been abandoned in full tabloid glare for another man by his ex-wife, Kerry Kennedy. Welcome to the cock fight.

Add the Republican public nostrums about the sanctity of marriage (even from the wronged Jeanine Pirro herself) and about the sanctity of wiretaps and torture, and this story has Mel Brooks written all over it. (It's probably too commerfcial for a future New York Film Festival.) Barring some other cataclysm or new sex scandal, there should be a Pirro sequel on the tabloid front pages every day for the whole festival.

Posted by dwhudson at September 29, 2006 12:31 PM