“In fact, this oppression is on everyone, regardless of their ideologies and beliefs. They don’t allow people to express their thoughts and support the national heroes in the way they like. It doesn’t make any difference if one approves of the regime and its ideology or disapproves of it. They can’t bypass these limits, and the problem stems from this.” – Jafar Panahi, on the thrust behind making Offside.
Creating a nuanced, graceful political or social statement can’t be easy, especially when that statement is the driving force of a film. Michael Moore beats us over the head with his thesis and supporting arguments. Paul Haggis’ psychological drama, Crash (2004), with its Academy Awards and all, is as subtle as a brick to the septum.
Maybe the lack of subtlety in films is an American thing.
Offside is the latest statement film from Persian director Jafar Panahi, and once again, it displays his deft touch in making a statement without shoving it in front of the viewer. His aims are clear, and his technique is not so subversive that the Iranian government gives it a second thought when enforcing outright bans on his films.
The difference between Offside and, say, Crash is that the ideas and the points that Jafar Panahi is trying to make are never explicitly discussed, except in those instances where those points advance the plot. Nobody talks about the fact that women aren’t allowed to watch a football match for the sake of conversation. They’re talking about it because there is a group of girls being held captive (in a rather loose sense of the word) outside the stadium for trying to get in to watch the football match. It’s the final World Cup qualifying match, no less, the biggest sporting event Iran has seen in some time.
How does Jafar Panahi avoid didacticism in his film? He makes the personal highly relevant. The latter point is probably the most impressive of his feats. The action between the time outside the Azadi stadium and the time inside the van of prisoners, Offside progresses in something approximating real time.
Offside begins at the start of the game, with the shy girl trying to see the game for the first time. She feels squeamish as she succumbs to a pat-down, while the story’s end shows viewers what victory can do for the collective psyche of a nation.
Jafar Panahi reveals that he pulled off this real-time trickery by adding certain cues, reactions, and settings that define the time in the context of the actual match. The crowd rushing into the stadium? That’s the actual crowd from the actual match. The very few in-stadium shots? Totally legit. There’s almost no musical score whatsoever, emphasizing Offside‘s pseudo-documentary feel. Using those cues, Panahi creates a narrative that takes the audience on a roller-coaster ride, framing a political film within a sports flick.
Once you get past the innovative and interesting contextual setup, however, it’s astounding how many moviemaking tropes appear in Offside. For one, the girls who get caught fall quite neatly into categorical boundaries. There’s the tough one who curses and smokes, the quiet one, our protagonist at the beginning of the film, who just wants to see the game, the creative one who comes up with military fatigues as a means of disguise, and the slippery tomboy, who actually catches a glimpse of the action.
These girls are held by the “just doing their job” guards, none of whom want such a job, but all of whom are bound to their duty. Even as it’s clear that they sympathize on some level with their captives, their sympathy is outweighed by the annoyance of having to keep them captive instead of watching the game themselves. Both the men and the girls in the story are captives, really, prisoners of what the film presents as an outdated, archaic mindset.
To be terribly reductive about the whole thing, the young are oppressed by the old. Again, this isn’t exactly new territory.
Even so, the presence of such familiarity works in Offside’s favor, as it increases the film’s accessibility to viewers outside of Iran. In the course of its initial release, Offside was reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, an odd place for a fully-subtitled allegorical narrative on the modern state of Iranian culture to appear. Where most such films would end up on The History Channel or IFC at best, Offside is the rare piece in the genre that has a shot at Showtime, or even HBO.
The DVD release of Offside suffers a bit from a dearth of extras. All that’s here is an interview with Jafar Panahi, which is admittedly very interesting. Over the course of the interview, he details his struggles in getting the movie made and released, as well as his motivation for creating it. It works better than a commentary track because reading two sets of subtitles would probably have been cumbersome, but it still allows for much more than just one interview.
A mini-documentary detailing the line of thought that leads to the banning of females from sporting events might have been appreciated, as would have been further interviews with the cast, or even a few outtakes in which Panahi faces some of the challenges inherent in his goal of creating a narrative as close to “real-time” as possible.
It’s difficult to understand why Jafar Panahi felt the need to eventually introduce a male troublemaker to coexist amongst the girls. It is also difficult to understand why he felt the need, in one case, to provide further motivation for watching the game beyond simply wanting to see it. Even amongst the missteps, however, Offside is a vital film about fundamental inequality.