Critics reviews

This may be Panahi’s most personal film, in which he reveals his ethno-linguistic identity.

It’s gratifying to see the fruitful quest pattern revived, and Panahi creates a work that is at once familiar and uniquely imaginative.

Panahi’s newest, 3 Faces, is the most freeform and expansive of the cycle of movies that has come to define the latter part of his filmography, and, crucially, it’s the film that brings him back to the feminist concerns that fueled so many of his definitive earlier works.

In its focus on two would-be artists prevented from practising their art (three if one counts Panahi himself), and specifically on the constraints circumscribing the lives and careers of women (in contrast to the director, who has clearly found clever ways around his punitive sentence), this is also quintessential Panahi.

It emerges as both a culmination and farewell to the strictures within which Panahi has flexed and maneuvered his cinematic vision over the last eight years. The film serves as an exemplary piece from which to reflect upon the continued political pertinence and cinematic innovation of Panahi’s filmmaking.

It isn’t great (lots of longeurs, some dialogue wheel-spinning, etc.), but—like the preceding Taxi, which took place in the titular…you know—it confirms that Panahi is still allowed to go outside the house, meaning he can literally drive into past modes of filmmaking, which is heartening.

It’s one of the director’s most distinctive stylistic achievements, with a visual elegance that sometimes reminded me of Antonioni films like “The Passenger.”

We should expect something more from the filmmaker who once directed expansive, empathetic works like Crimson Gold and The Mirror, and who even made two genuine and deeply unnerving films under house arrest, This Is Not a Film and Closed Curtain. Instead of trying to make a certified copy, Panahi should just be himself.

The same tendency towards telling rather than showing plagues the film as a whole, as everyone is unusually fond of saying exactly what’s on their mind and commenting on what’s currently happening, with merely the closing stretches allowing the images to begin to speak for themselves. It’s only then that the Kiarostami parallels start to feel earned rather than merely unflattering.

It shows Panahi to be ever the resourceful formal escape artist, as he avoids boxing himself in, weaves in some hilarious and scarily blunt encounters with heartland conservatism, and elegantly, movingly reunifies his by-now reflexively reflexive structure with a (not disposably) wistful sense of destiny in the world.

The really absorbing paradox here is that by shifting his focus away from his own lack of freedom and onto that of a whole underclass of Iranian womanhood, Panahi has made what feels like his freest film since the ban was imposed, if also his most elusive.

Although it sometimes flirts with being too much of an homage to Kiarostami’s totemic 1990s films (the recent death of his mentor clearly had a profound effect on Panahi), the proceedings are handled with Panahi’s deft touch, and his unwavering concern for holding onto the mystery of cinema remains unimpaired here.