When you look into Jafar Panahi’s Mirror, what is reflected back to you is a reality so real you can’t help but wonder how uncanny and inaccessible reality can be, but also how rewarding it is to see it from this particular angle that the Mirror affords its seer. The Mirror is Mr. Panahi’s second feature and an inarguable landmark of Iranian cinema.
The film begins surreptitiously, almost imperceptible of its own motives; the camera roves aimlessly but confidently, wading through a boisterous crowd of school kids leaving school, then picks up an elderly man with a walking stick trying very hard but failing to cross a busy road, then it abandons the old man to tail two young workers carrying big red cushions on their backs as they effortlessly cut through the merciless traffic. The camera finally lands on Mina, a young school girl with an arm cast, as she bids her friend goodbye outside their school, but her own mother is nowhere to be seen. Mina asks for the time from a passerby but he tells her that his watch doesn’t work. Mina then fumbles about with her bag, then crosses the busy street to a phonebooth where she struggles successfully with one arm and being too short to make a call to her mother. Unfortunately, she received no reply and was subsequently rushed out by an impatient lady behind her. Mina then goes back to the school and hounds a school teacher for help, who was also being hounded at the same time by an insistent old man to dress appropriately for an (off-screen) wedding. This is all very mundane, yet real, and strangely compelling for how incongruous reality can oftentimes appear to us. Then, the man agrees to courier the young girl to a nearby bus stop, they converse on his motor bike, and you wonder if he is an idiot for sending a child to a crowded public area alone. You wonder what will happen to this girl, what dangers could possibly befall upon her on this cinematic journey (as one is conditioned to expect from cinema’s naturalized adherence to the Hero’s Journey). Instead, it was the old man who got caught in a road accident right after Mina has alighted. From here on, we have already, unknowingly, seeped into her being, and we have been gifted unexpected access into a childlike perspective of 90’s Iranian society – where women and men sit separately on buses, where veiled women gossip incessantly about petty domestic conspiracies, where a husband and wife, not able to sit together on the bus, can only gaze at each other lovingly from a crowded distance. These are all classically poetic moments of quotidian magic, best witnessed through a child’s lens, affect as a form of cinematically induced spirituality.
30 minutes in, Jafar Panahi has proven that he is a master of filmic realism.
40 minutes in, he graciously opens up the film to gift us Iranian realism.
What follows isn’t a well-hidden twist, nor should it deserve any cultish protection for it’s a twist that is necessarily belongs to our reality, yet, when it occurs on screen, it will stun you. The little girl looks into the camera, and then decides that she has had enough of playing a role. The first time I watched the film, I have just finished reading an essay by Giorgio Agamben, and in one segment he explained the ontological dilemma of the Actor: the actor can neither aspire to choose nor to refuse the part that the author has chosen for him, but he also cannot identify himself with the part without leaving some residue of himself in it. In that moment however, the character Mina looks into the mirror and smashes it, leaving the shattered fragments to accurately reflect through its damaged conditions the reality of this situation: Mina is refusing to play the role of Mina any longer. In the film business, a casting director would cast an actor not just for the compatibility of their physical appearance, but also for something more implicit – their ability to bring a certain unique essence of their own being into the role. Almost as if a rebuke to this sort of subjection of the self by the (sometimes very overbearing) order of the film, Mina here is completely withdrawing herself from the system. She begins practicing a kind of Glissant-esque opacity, refusing to explain her tantrum to any of the set assistants as she changes out of the costume into her own outfit (which is basically the same look except without the cast and a different coloured hijab). Panahi himself makes an extended cameo as the troubled director faced with an impossible child actress. Meanwhile the film rolls on into a documentary, and the secluded world of film becomes porous to the actual world – a woman carrying loads of shopping tries to board the bus set only to be rejected, she must be thinking to herself as she walks off: ‘how unexpected reality can be! That looks just like the bus I take to go home everyday and yet, today it belongs to Jafar Panahi.’
Realising that Mina still has her wireless microphone attached, the crew decides to follow her from a distance while picking up on the audio transmitted. Ironically, the second half of the film, though playing out as a documentary of Mina escaping the set and trying to find her way home for reals now, becomes unexpectedly intertwined with the fiction Jafar Panahi was shooting. Here, I can’t help but see Mina through the figure of the Baudrillardian child: ‘Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.’ A child claims subjecthood when being demanded to be an object through subjective disobedience, revolt, and so on for its rights to freedom, emancipation and expression; when faced with the demands of subjecthood, it opposes again in the same way an object resists, through childishness, hyperconformism, idiocy, passivity, etc whatever. However, Mina here is resisting the way an Object of Harman’s school of Object-Oriented Ontology would resist this subjection expected of her – she renounces her subject position, the role given to her by the author, and whatever predictable meanings to be found in that subjecthood, as she completely withdraws into her own agency. A form of objection, but not a petty, nihilistic one, as it is this objection/objecting that allows Mina to show us (albeit through a voyeuristic lens <isn’t all cinema voyeurism after all>) her objective pursuit for personal truth.
It must be pointed out that Mina Mohammad Khani is a fantastic actress; her precocious visage holds the frame like very few child actors can. When she starts to cry, it is with tears that come as naturally as they are surprising. When she is negotiating with adults or a gang of adults (as she is wont to do plenty in this film), she holds her own, fully aware of the dangers of being a lone child running around Tehran, yet she never dabbles in cunningness (only necessary shrewdness), she treats everyone with an indomitable sense of respect. It seems like Mina alone knows Mina best, and even though Panahi cast her because he detected ‘a feeling of emptiness within her’, it is this assured agency that confronts her inner emptiness and the relentless chaos of the streets with an admirable courage. There is something truly special in this child without whom, this film will most likely lose much of its subversive and magnetic power.
It is tempting to label The Mirror as postmodern, but ‘postmodern’ would seem to connote something derisory for The Mirror is neither nihilistic nor obscure nor incoherent, even as it is extremely self-aware and employs postmodern tropes like reflexivity and deconstruction of the medium itself. As much as The Mirror is undoubtedly an arthouse film that warrants high-brow conceptual readings, it is also a humble, grounded piece of work that follows closely in the vein of Iranian realism. The characteristics of which include: poetic realism in its storytelling, tonally self-reflexive, a child protagonist (this is in fact a practical result of the heavy regulations on films in Iran), and a focus on the lower class (this is debatable as Mina seems to be middle class but whatever, an optimistic result of postmodernism is that essential identity gradually holds less and less weight). What happens when Jafar Panahi opens up the film, when Mina shatters the genre with that one gaze, when our suspension of disbelief suddenly shifts into suspension of belief (belief for fiction, for the medium, for the rules of the genre)? First of all, we must consider the incredibly masterful handling of the logistical aspect of this meta-documentary style. Nowhere in the second portion would I exceptionally doubt the veracity of his (faux)documentarian realism. The streets of Tehran are forever flooded with cars, Mina runs around talking to strangers and even police officers as if they are really there doing their jobs, and the audio visual style matches up with their glitches, loss of resolution, slips and disconnections.
The medium finds itself interrogated, all its virtues and vices examined in the insuppressible cracks the film forces out of it. This is what Marshall McLuhan might call an ‘anti-environmental’ work, in that it actively disrupts the all-pervasive environment(/the establishment, but in its most seductive form within modern mediums, aka the advertisable glossy surface of images) in order to provoke in us a critical awareness of the groundrules, structures and patterns within said environment. Experientially, the way we expect films will also be affected; what happens when one scene that usually leads to another familiar scenario takes a hard left turn, and brings us somewhere completely unexpected. That is a classic technique of subversive (or plainly, good) cinema. But it is only in these directed slippages that cinema offers its audiences revelations, instead of an uncritical conformity that more often than not leads to fast, uncomplicated and brief euphoria. A safe reiteration of meanings and emotions that will after all be subjected to the dominant ideology of its time. Given the paradoxical role of reality in The Mirror, our own perception will also not remain passive, it will be attacked on a scale our rationality is not prepared to decipher. By pitting hyperreality (classic realist cinema) against another seemingly ‘realer’ form of hyperreality (meta-documentary), the tension faced by the viewer supersedes aesthetics, and arrests us in a sublime state of mediated indeterminacy. From here, the question I find most interesting is, how do we traverse the dizzying layers of mediated realities in our own lives, and how can we do it the way Mina is showing us – with unbridled agency amidst a fog of indeterminacy and permanently shifting grounds?
There is an extended sequence in which we momentarily lose Mina but we can still listen in on her little adventure. The camera is stuck on a car that was stopped by a policeman, thus losing track of Mina. It then travels through a narrow alleyway, in search of her. We can still hear her through the microphone left on her person. At the end of the alleyway, a battered car is being lifted into the air by a crane – it is a spectacular image, quotidian but striking. We hear Mina talking to a strange man who said (out of context here) that her Dad should know who he is. For a second, we feel what Mr Panahi is fearing – are we going to hear a child being abducted, and surely we’d have to bear a level of complicity here too, right? But no, because Mr Panahi doesn’t believe in human evil, the scene went in another direction. It was nothing sensation but truly unforgettable for reasons I find hard to describe sufficiently with words. It’s so hard to describe something so simple sometimes, but at the very least, I know the feels are oh so real. And for all its conceptual devices, it’s these very real feels it evokes that ultimately makes The Mirror worth its ambitions.