The Mirror Director: Jafar Panahi Year: 1997 Length: 95 min. Country: Iran
In Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror, there is no literal mirror. Cinema is the mirror. That unstated but clearly demonstrated idea crystallizes and unites the traditional Persian use of mirrors as symbols of art and much else (including the symbol itself, according to Titus Burckhardt) and the modern Iranian fascination with cinema’s reflective/reflexive properties. As such, it conflates motifs inherited from the films of both Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, from Where Is the Friend’s House? to Once Upon a Time, Cinema. Not incidentally, it is also one of Iran’s most ingenious and intriguing chimeric films, since Panahi juxtaposes and muses on the fictional and documentary aspects of film in a way that no other director does. 6
The film, a drolly understated comedy, turns on a surprising twist midway through its length that won’t be revealed here. Suffice it to say that the narrative’s ostensible premise is simplicity itself: Mina (Mina Mohammad-Khani), a little girl in the first grade, leaves school one day and finds that her mother hasn’t
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arrived to pick her up. Perplexed, she decides to make her way home herself. The film then follows her on her journey, although, as noted, there’s a big surprise — more for the audience than for Mina, perhaps — along the route.
Panahi’s second feature, The Mirror stems from his work with Kiarostami, who wrote his former assistant’s first feature, The White Balloon, which in a way reprised his own first feature, The Traveler (1973), in its use of two elements that came to be associated with Iranian films generally and Kiarostami’s in particular: a child protagonist, and a quest theme usually expressed by a long journey.
The child-centric film, which had its roots in Kiarostami’s work at the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, became a staple in Iranian art cinema in the ’80s and ’90s in large part because it allowed filmmakers to avoid themes and situations that Iran’s strict content regulations proscribed for
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