“Closed Curtain” screened as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, where it had its American debut. This early review is just an impression from the festival. The film does not yet have an American release date.
“Closed Curtain” starts with a stark reminder that its director, the Iranian Jafar Panahi, is still under house arrest by the Iranian government and banned from making films. His first under these conditions was the critically acclaimed “This is Not a Film.” This is a film however, and it’s a strange hybrid of fantasy and documentary that, with the strenuous nature of its making, collapses under the weight of being so meta.
The opening shot is an extended take of the camera facing out a barred window. It sits there as though it’s just recording whatever may pass by, and over agonizing minutes, we see a man pull up in a car, take a bag out and carry it all the way inside the house. He has just smuggled a dog into the home, but the man is not Jafar Panahi.
He’s a writer (Kambuzia Partovi), and he’s illegally harboring this dog in his home, covering up the windows with black curtains to hide that he has it. But one night as he is cleaning out the dog’s litter box, two refugees find his way into his home. One goes to look for help while the other, a young woman named Melika (Maryam Moqadam), remains and causes the writer unnecessary stress.
She’s suicidal and sporadic, answering questions with wistful vagueness. But she’s also surprising and seems to materialize mysteriously. The writer records himself re-creating the evening in which she broke into his home, and nothing he does gets him quite closer to a realization.
This however is a momentary segue into otherwise what is essentially a mundane, plotless, yet not uninteresting film. “Closed Curtain” is shot with stark clarity in a way that makes it just slightly more surreal. The dog sits watching other dogs be mutilated on television, and it’s as though he’s observing his own world news, desensitized and unimpressed.
But the big turning point of “Closed Curtain” is when the curtains finally come down. Hidden on the walls behind the black shades are movie posters seen in reverse. It’s a momentary head scratcher until the camera swivels and reveals Panahi himself on the other side of the room, a mirror reflecting his own movie posters on the opposite wall.
Melika and the writer never appear in the same shot as Panahi, but the three occupy the same space, both seeming to inhabit the existence of the other. “You think you can capture reality? Especially in here,” Melika asks the writer, but it’s a broad metaphor to Panahi’s own intentions. As they seek to influence him, their actions can’t move forward without Panahi’s imagination. His documentary portrayal of making breakfast and sharing lunch with friends and neighbors interrupts that almost completely.
“Closed Curtain” has a way of tying you up in pretzels like this. With characters who appear and vanish, determining who belongs to reality, fiction or the fake reality Panahi seems to live in is a bit of a mess. Panahi even shows behind the figurative or literal curtain to show how certain scenes were made, and it doesn’t achieve the soul-searching impact in the way you may imagine.
It’s too much meta upon meta upon even more, and even the most evocative sequences are dragged on mercilessly and feel painfully uneventful. Panahi displayed greatness when he was not making a film, but his choice to make a unique one doesn’t stretch the definition but confuses the issue.
2 ½ stars
1 thought on “CIFF Review: Closed Curtain”