‘Circle’ of Suffering Connects and Imprisons

Restrained yet powerful, devastating in its emotional effects, “The Circle” is a landmark in Iranian cinema. By combining two things that are relatively rare in that country’s production--unapologetically dramatic storytelling and an implicit challenge to the prevailing political ideology--this new film by producer-director Jafar Panahi creates a potent synthesis that was the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Panahi’s first film, “The White Balloon,” took the prestigious Camera d’Or at Cannes and became something of an art-house hit over here. Yet it, too, shared in the slow, allusive nature of much of Iran’s cinema of indirection, where the response to an intrusive, censorious government has been to pull back and make films where narrative drive is suspect and hardly anything is allowed to happen.

“The Circle” is a different story. Its pace is insistent, its drama obvious and its theme, the plight of women in post-revolutionary Iran, the constricted, wasted nature of their lives, couldn’t be more provocative. As with Soviet-era Eastern European cinema, societies in conflict invariably create the most potent dramas.

Though Panahi didn’t make “The Circle” to challenge the government, the powers that be made his life difficult. The screenplay by Kambozia Partovi was only approved after public pressure from now-defunct reformist newspapers and, once finished, the film was banned in its homeland and was only allowed overseas with great reluctance.

“The Circle” shares in the neorealistic style that dominates current Iranian cinema, with nonprofessionals taking on most of the roles. But Panahi’s exceptional eye for faces combines beautifully with cinematographer Bahram Badakhshani’s intimate, naturalistic camera work. As a result, we feel not like we’re watching a film but that we’re living a reality.

As its title indicates, “The Circle” shares the lives of several women who are joined in a sisterhood of misery. Set on the streets of Tehran, the stories don’t intertwine but are told consecutively, as the camera, with seeming randomness, leaves one woman to concentrate on the next. What’s gradually revealed is the unthinking, suffocating chauvinism of Iranian society and the hopelessness it engenders in women.

“The Circle” opens in a maternity hospital with the birth of a baby girl. But instead of treating this as a happy event, the grandmother, a woman with a truly tragic face, foresees calamity. The ultrasound had indicated a boy, and she knows that in male-oriented Iran, her in-laws will be furious that it’s not.

As the grandmother flees the hospital, the camera leaves her and concentrates on a group of agitated women on the street. We are thrust immediately into their story, which turns out to be the film’s central one, and it’s only gradually that we find out who they are and what their situation is.

Both the hawk-faced Arezou (Maryiam Parvin Almani) and the naive, dreamy Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh) are on a temporary pass from prison, but they have no intention of going back. Nargess wants to return to her rural village, but has no money, and Arezou is determined to get the cash for her despite their lack of proper papers, a major handicap in a city where police checks and roving neighborhood watches are omnipresent.

Other women and their difficulties also make their way into “The Circle,” dramas about women who hide their pasts, are desperate for illegal abortions or driven to consider abandoning their children. Through these stories we find how the small and seemingly inconsequential ways women’s lives are circumscribed reflect a larger, more disturbing reality.

Women in Iran cannot smoke in public. They can’t enter certain buildings without an all-enveloping chador. They can’t even buy a bus ticket if they are traveling alone. Yet the men in the city, even the members of the supposedly zealous neighborhood watch, are free to hassle them sexually on the street, and, in one telling telephone scene, proposition them whenever it suits their fancy.

It’s not by chance, we gradually realize, that the film’s central figures are presented as prisoners, prisoners whose crime we are never told. Trapped almost as literally as if they were in a cage, strangers in their own land, their stories don’t really end, they simply vanish from our field of vision. “The Circle,” however, makes them unforgettable.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: mature subject matter.

‘The Circle’

Fereshteh Sadr Orafi: Pari

Maryiam Parvin Almani: Arezou

Nargess Mamizadeh: Nargess

Elham Saboktakin: Elham

Fatemeh Naghavi: Nayereh

Mojgan Faramarzi: Mojgan

A Jafar Panahi Film Productions, Mikado-Lumiere & Co. production released by Winstar Cinema. Director Jafar Panahi. Producer Jafar Panahi. Screenplay Kambozia Partovi, based on an original idea by Jafar Panahi. Cinematographer Bahram Badakhshani. Editor Jafar Panahi. Set decorator Vajid Allah Fariborzi. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

In limited release.