AYNEH
The film It's the end of the day at school. The children are all going home except for Mina who is waiting in vain for her mother to come. The little girl decides to go home alone. A long voyage begins. In fact she only knows the way when her mother is leading her. Which bus should she take? Where does she get off? It's all very mysterious for Mina and grown-ups are not always very helpful. In the bus, she listens to adults' conversations. They seem unfamiliar. Itinerant musicians play a traditional tune. A scream brings the story to a halt: Mina doesn't want to be part of the film anymore... She gets off the bus, leaves the film crew and decides to go home alone, forgetting that she's still wearing the microphone. The film-maker decides to follow her without her knowing. The "story" starts up again... Panahi rediscovers the lead actor of Badkonak-e sefid (The White Balloon). Again the plot is constructed around a frantic quest seen from the little girl's perspective. But a spanner is thrown in the works of the "fiction" machine, allowing the story to repeat itself. In the same vein as Va zendegi edameh darad (And Life Goes On, 1992) by Kiarostami - Panahi's master -, Ayneh questions the status of fiction and its relation to reality. Even so, and despite the change in levels, the plot - finding her way home - remains the same and shows, in its own way, that beyond the game of mirrors that has been set up, reality irreparably transcends fiction. Or meets up with it, concurs with it, embraces it, intimately - definitively. Ayneh is a game of masks with a script inside a script, like Russian dolls. The film is also a stubborn quest, as thrilling as a Hitchcock. A sort of dream state, or that of nightmares - a goal constantly deferred - sets the action in motion. But all initiation tales come to an end and Panahi leaves the girl the last word... Panahi's The Mirror, one of the most subversive films in the festival, takes up themes and situations common to many Iranian films. A little girl, Mina, with her arm in a cast, waits after school for her mother to pick her up. When the woman doesn't show up, the girl, who doesn't know her street address, takes off across Tehran in search of her home. She encounters a series of grownups, who are not indifferent to her plight, but offer no real assistance either. She is relentless and resourceful, refusing to accept any obstacle as insurmountable. Halfway through the film, as the little girl stands at the front of a bus, we hear the director's voice: "Don't look at the camera, Mina." The girl takes off the fake cast and her head scarf and announces that she is not acting any more. She quits. The director puts his heads in his hands. Various people are sent to talk to her, to no avail. She won't explain why, but she refuses to go on with the film. Since she still has a microphone attached to her clothes the director decides to follow the 'real' girl with a camera as she now tries to find her 'real' home. Real life mirrors the film story, or vice versa. Mina makes her away across the forbidding big city, with only a few familiar landmarks as her guide. The status of women comes up frequently. When she attempts to enter a bus by the front door, for example, she is told to enter by the rear door, reserved for women. In a taxi we overhear an older man who believes in the inferiority of women. An old woman, whose son and daughter-in-law want to place her in a nursing home, sits on a bench and stares into space. It is to her that Mina confides her reasons for quitting: that if her friends see her with a cast on her arm they'll think she's clumsy, that the film script puts her in the first grade when she's actually in the second, that the film makes her look like a nagger and a crybaby and that she hates the scarf she has to wear on her head. In the end, by one means and another, Mina reaches home. The director, through the man who originally put the little girl in touch with the filmmakers, makes one final appeal to get the young actress to reconsider. No, she won't do it. Now bareheaded, she decisively closes the door to her house. The film is impervious to censorship. Who could object to a simple and undeniably moving story about a girl who quits a film in the middle of shooting and finds her own way home? But, looked at from another point of view, a film about someone who says, in effect, "I reject this role. No, no, no. No matter what you say, I refuse," has considerable implications. It says something about the girl, about all those who try to persuade her to change her mind and about the society.
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