Compared with the tense drama surrounding Zara and Bakhtiar, what happens to the filmmaker seems at first like comic relief — a fish-out-of-water caper about a big-city sophisticate snagged by rustic brambles. Everyone in the village is unstintingly, ostentatiously polite. Ghanbar never fails to address Panahi as “dear sir,” and Panahi responds with fulsome gratitude, but mutual resentment simmers beneath their interactions, and the rituals of courtesy and deference that govern Panahi’s dealings with Ghanbar’s neighbors are heavy with mistrust, hostility and even the possibility of violence.
I won’t give anything away, except to say that when tragedy arrives — in and behind the scenes of Zara and Bakhtiar’s story, and in every fold of the film’s constructed reality — it feels both shocking and grimly inevitable. It also seems to be, partially and inadvertently but also unmistakably, the filmmaker’s fault.
At one point, Panahi is summoned to the village “swear room,” where he is expected to testify about his suspicious photograph. It isn’t a legal proceeding — a sympathetic elder tells him it’s permissible to lie — but rather one of many local traditions established to keep up appearances and rein in unruly behavior. Before making his statement, Panahi asks that the Quran be replaced by a video camera, which he believes will endow his words with unimpeachable credibility.
But what if this show of faith — in visual evidence, in the documentary record, in the moral prestige of the moving image — is itself a kind of superstition? That’s the uncomfortable question that “No Bears” faces, one that challenges not only its own assumptions but also the piety of an audience eager to embrace the film as a gesture of resistance and to bless itself for recognizing the gesture. Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.
Maybe art can’t save anyone, or change anything. So why bother with it? I’m tempted to say that “No Bears” answers that question simply by existing, but to do so would be to understate Panahi’s accomplishment.
The title refers to an encounter he has on the way to the swear room, a meeting with a stranger that seems like something out of a folk tale. The man cautions that there are dangerous bears lurking in the darkness, and later dismisses his own warning. “Our fear empowers others,” he says. “No Bears!”
That’s a good slogan, and a necessary belief in a very scary world, but also, maybe, a consoling fiction. To insist that there are no bears may just be a polite way of acknowledging that the bears are us.
No Bears
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
