adults. Such films also made use of Iran’s seemingly endless supply of preternaturally talented child actors.
In The White Balloon, a little girl who sets out to buy a gold fish for use in her New Year’s celebrations and ends up going through a myriad of social and physical situations in the part of Tehran near her home, a set of experiences that Panahi records with a documentarian’s avidity. As I wrote in reviewing the film, its “scenes and sequences carefully register accents from all over Iran, different modes of speech and dress and social bearing, all with a precision and scrupulousness that, far more than just giving the story a rich backdrop, seem aimed at a kind of Homeric cataloguing.” 7
In the homeward odyssey of The Mirror, the
cataloguing continues. If the quest motif that also structures this film has a mystical dimension in Kiarostami, for Panahi it serves just the opposite purpose: rather than the ineffable and inexpressible, he’s out to capture the quotidian, the sights and sounds and textures of the here-and-now. Having spent a fair amount of time in Tehran, I can testify that The Mirror, better than any other film I know, exactingly renders the city’s particular hustle-bustle, its clogged streets and wild traffic and motley mix of people from all classes and regions of Iran. And it’s not only the visual aspects of all of this that Panahi delights in showing us. Sans music, the film’s soundtrack is a veritable symphony of urban noises including reports of a soccer match between South Korea and Iran (where soccer is a national obsession) that are heard over ambient radios as Mina makes
her way from street to motorbike to bus. (Panahi and Kiarostami also share a love of different modes of auto transport.)
In writing about The White Balloon, I noted that, “Beyond its documentary-like matrix, the method employed here — Kiarostami’s, adapted by Panahi — has two related poles, each inclining toward a different idea of order. The aesthetic pole inclines toward symmetry, the ethical pole toward sympathy or compassion.” 8
The same goes for The Mirror. Sympathy and compassion are key to the film’s human drama (and comedy). Can Mina make it home alone? Will people — mainly strangers — help her, ignore her, or worse? As it happens, she gets a whole range or reactions, from the utterly indifferent to the cheerfully beneficent. Among Panahi’s great subjects as an artist are the social bonds that link Iranians, for good and ill. Here he registers a panoply of them in fascinating detail. Yet when all is said and done, little Mina relies on no one more than herself. As the poem says, she’s the captain of her own soul — an instance of the feminism that will become increasingly important in Panahi’s films.
As for the aforementioned symmetry, the surprise that bisects the narrative also effectively divides the film into halves, or faces — giving the whole a kind of Alice Through the Looking Glass reflexivity. Before the surprise what we’re watching is more a fictional- film-with-documentary-aspects; after the surprise, it looks more like a documentary-with-fictional-aspects. (Note the similarity to the Nizami poem about the two
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