Had Steven Spielberg been arrested, for whatever reason, shortly after finishing The Fabelmans, critics would certainly have made note of that fact right up top in their reviews. “Incidentally, this movie’s director currently occupies a prison cell” just isn’t the sort of detail one can omit, however purely gossipy it might be. When it comes to renowned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, however, incarceration isn’t remotely extratextual. Since his 2010 conviction for ostensible crimes against the regime—he dared to be openly critical of its oppression—Panahi has been under varying degrees of house arrest, when not actually in prison, and remains officially banned from making films. Courageously undaunted, he’s somehow managed to direct (or co-direct) no fewer than five features over those dozen years, though they’re collectively quite distinct from the relatively conventional dramas that he made in the ’90s and ’00s. Each one “stars” Panahi himself, to some degree, and acknowledges his predicament; even the one called Taxi, in which he drives a cab around Tehran, chatting with his passengers, is fundamentally about the restrictions that have been placed upon his movement. That these films exist at all is miraculous; that they’re artistically robust, even more so.


What’s fascinating about No Bears, Panahi’s latest covert effort—it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, just two months after he was arrested again (at this writing, I believe he’s still behind bars)—is the gradual realization that world cinema’s most notable victim has cast himself, this time around, in the role of an inadvertent oppressor. That’s one hell of an audacious move, especially given the subtlety with which his now-standard meta-story’s auto-critical aspects emerge. At first, it even looks as if Panahi might have returned to non-autobiographical filmmaking: No Bears’ complicated opening shot, which anyone who’s been to Turkey will immediately recognize as having been shot there, introduces two clearly fictional characters as they fret about making an illegal border crossing. Turns out this is a movie-within-the-movie, being remotely directed by Panahi, who’s traveled to a small town in northern Iran, very near the Turkish border, supposedly in order to feel closer to the production. As his assistant director points out, though, he could just as easily Skype-direct from his home in Tehran. It soon becomes clear that Panahi—or at least “Panahi,” his onscreen alter ego—is flirting with the idea of fleeing Iran, though anyone who’s been following the news lately, or has read the paragraph above, will be disconsolately aware that Panahi did no such thing in real life.


Regardless, that’s a potentially fruitful new development in this director’s enforced long-term reflexive project, so it’s quite a surprise when Panahi largely abandons it. We see very little of the movie that he’s not-quite-there to not-quite-shoot (which is a good thing, for a reason I’ll address below), and while there’s an early, wonderfully tense nighttime sequence in which Panahi’s assistant takes him to the Iran-Turkey border—with Panahi, belatedly informed of where he is, stepping back as if the unmarked perimeter were molten lava—the question of whether he’ll choose to escape dissipates very quickly. Instead, No Bears spends most of its first half simply observing the director as he struggles to get a working wifi signal and then, with nothing else to do for the moment, just wanders around the village, snapping candid photographs of its inhabitants and reassuring the more anxious among them that he won’t get anyone else in trouble. By the film’s midpoint, it’s no longer entirely clear what we’re watching, or why. (Although, as promised, there definitely haven’t been any bears. The title does get explained eventually.) If Panahi’s not going to make a break for it, and he’s not going to be busy feeding crew members instructions via laptop, what is he going to do?


Cause trouble for others. Two distinct but thematically related threads evolve, one in Iran and one in Turkey. The former is by far the more complex and thorny: Among the numerous photos that Panahi snapped on his digital camera—we actually see him take it, though its subjects aren’t in the film frame and there’s no apparent significance to the moment in question—is, the villagers believe, a shot that captures a young woman in the company of the man she loves, who unfortunately is not the same individual as the man to whom she’s been promised since childhood. Panahi claims to have taken no such picture, and even lets people examine his camera’s archive (though not before we see him fiddle with it at some length, without any indication of what he’s doing); this doesn’t mollify their concerns much, and he’s asked to take part in what amounts to a swearing ceremony, testifying on the Qu’ran that he’s telling the truth. Where this goes is best experienced via the movie itself, but Panahi—the one who’s making No Bears—depicts “Panahi” as a well-meaning urbanite whose attitude toward local customs and mores is at best patronizing, at worst actively destructive. Such a casually damning self-portrait would be remarkable in any context; coming from someone with justifiable reason to feel self-pity, it’s almost violent, as if Panahi can no longer stomach being perceived as heroic.


As if that weren’t enough, the film-within-the-film simultaneously takes a tragic turn, in large part because “Panahi,” making what appears to be a documentary-fiction hybrid of some kind (the actors are playing themselves and enacting, for the camera, their own actual attempt at using stolen and fake passports for a trip to Europe), cares more about devising a satisfying narrative than he does about his actors’ personal safety. Or at least that’s the accusation made by one of them (Mina Kavani), in a fiery direct-to-the-lens monologue that complains of the project’s fundamental phoniness—at one point, she angrily yanks off the wig she’s wearing—while also itself coming across as rather phony, much more obviously scripted and acted than any of the Iran-set scenes. Even after the fourth wall gets broken, it still feels like a movie. Now, this gets tricky, because Panahi has long enjoyed toying with the viewer’s understanding of what is and isn’t real; his 1997 feature The Mirror, for example, pivots on its lead actor, a little girl, deciding halfway through that she doesn’t want to be in the movie anymore, and it’s very hard to tell whether that actually happened or was cleverly engineered. So while I don’t think that the scenes shot in Turkey are deliberately clumsy and stilted, and assume those qualities to be an unfortunate consequence of Panahi genuinely having to direct them remotely (because he genuinely can’t leave Iran), it’s entirely possible that this is all part of the filmmaker’s grand design.


Either way, the very possibility that Panahi has a grand design, in the fifth defiantly self-interrogating feature he’s made while expressly banned from doing so by the Iranian government (one wonders whether he still has to smuggle them out on flash drives hidden in birthday cakes, as was famously the case with 2011’s cheeky This Is Not a Film), makes No Bears a must-see. While I haven’t loved any of his post-arrest films as much as I do Offside, or to a lesser extent Crimson Gold and The White Balloon, each of them is at the very least a testament to his stubborn conviction that artistic expression cannot be denied. To then interrogate that very conviction, to wonder aloud whether it might cause others grief—folks, that’s the work of an artist.


One of the first notable online film critics, having launched his site The Man Who Viewed Too Much in 1995, Mike D’Angelo has also written professionally for Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Esquire, Las Vegas Weekly, and The A.V. Club, among other publications. He’s been a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and currently blathers opinions almost daily on Patreon.