Closed Curtain – Film Review by Frank L.

Directed by Jafar Panahi and Kambuzia Partovi

Stars: Kambuzia Partovi, Maryam Moqadam, Jafar Panahi

On 10th December 2010, Jafar Panahi was sentenced in Iran to six years imprisonment and barred for the next twenty years from film making, all political activity, travelling or giving interviews. He was forty years old. He currently exists under a sort of house arrest. However Closed Curtain is the second film he has made under a partial blind eye being turned by the Iranian regime. The first one had the witty title “This is not a film” and was shot in his Tehran apartment. Closed Curtain is filmed entirely from within his holiday home on the Caspian Sea. In order to make any sense of the film it is important to be conscious of the fact that Panahi, with his co-director Partovi, were confined to the house on the Caspian Sea and the views from its windows.

The opening sequence is of the shore of the Caspian Sea seen through the barred picture window of the holiday home. A man and then another man, about two minutes later, leave a car in the mid distance. The first one enters the house and the second one eventually delivers some luggage and some bottles of water. The sea remains a constant. In one piece of luggage, a hold all, there is a most lovely mongrel dog…a delightful creature with one ear, the left one, always drooping just a little. He is the reason the man has come to this remote house. It is to protect the very existence of the dog which is subject to the threat of death, along with other dogs, under the fanatical laws of the regime. The man is a writer and he intends to write in this secluded place which will give him peace and the dog a sanctuary.

However that is not possible as the outside world intervenes in the form of a brother and sister who also have defied the regime and are wanted. They disrupt the rhythm of the house. What Panahi then relates is a series of stories about the writer and about himself. The two stories are intertwined but are they? Or is this the artistic struggle trying to find a means to manifest itself? It is not easy to follow the story line nor is it easy to know what Panahi is trying to state. However given the incarceration under which Panahi survives there is an obligation to ponder what he is trying to relate. Oscar Wilde wrote “De Profundis” within the confines of Reading gaol and in contemplating “Closed Curtain” it would be well to remember that Panahi was and is in the depths.