Panahi picks out Mina (Mina Mohammad-Khani), a first-grader with her left arm in a cast and a sling, among a group of children outside a Tehran primary school that has just let out for the day. This focus on youngsters, however, is nothing new in the Iranian cinema, reaching back more than 20 years to “The Mina Cycle,” a bleak allegory of life under the Shah, and “The Runner,” which dared to suggest that for the dispossessed, life could be just as hard under Khomeini as it was under the Pahlevi dynasty. It’s the latest in a group of recent powerful films, including the Oscar-nominated “Children of Heaven” and “The Apple,” in which Iranian filmmakers, working in a severely proscribed national cinema, have focused on children as a way of dealing with the realities of life in present-day Iran. Panahi’s new film is similar to “The White Balloon” yet even more illuminating of Islamic society. “The Mirror” marks a most welcome return of writer-director Jafar Panahi, whose 1995 “The White Balloon” became an international breakthrough for the Iranian cinema with its simple tale of how a little girl’s errand to buy a goldfish to celebrate the New Year turns into a revealing odyssey.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |