by Allan Fish
(Iran 1995 85m) DVD1
Aka. Badkonake sefid
Dancing with their fins
p Kurosh Mazkouri d Jafar Panahi w Abbas Kiarostami ph Farzad Jahat ed Jafar Panahi
Aida Mohammadkhani (Razieh), Mohsen Kafili (Ali), Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy (mother), Anna Borkowska (old lady), Mohammad Shahani (soldier), Mohammad Bakhtiar (tailor), Hamidreza Tahery (Reza), Aliasghar Smardi (balloon seller)
It’s time for an academic game, a theoretical test, and one that seems apt when discussing an Iranian film. Your subject is The White Balloon, but you have to pick one word to describe it and then write a small essay on why that word is appropriate. One might pick ‘balloon’, but then you wouldn’t have seen the movie. ‘White’ would be less controversial as it features prominently, but still one suspects it would be limited to discussion of the mise-en-scène. One might pick goldfish, but again one might find it limiting. So I go for neither. For me, only one word presents itself – continuity.
Now what do I mean by continuity. Not the job title sense of the word, surely, not in an Iranian film, where all films seem to be filmed in such a minimalist style that one shouldn’t have a problem avoiding continuity errors. Neither does it refer to the narrative as a whole, which follows a classical cause and effect form and even takes place in real time. What I’m rather getting at is the sense of continuity which permeates Iranian film as a whole. When presidents are replaced or when monarchs die and are succeeded, there’s always talk of continuity. This equally applies to national cinemas, and in Iran the continuity goes deeper, applicable indeed to individual films.
Take the Makhmalbafs, where the continuity is in the genes, from Mohsen to Samira to Hana. Yet via Mohsen they are connected to a longer tradition in Iranian filmmaking, back to Kiarostami. He has been the principal flag bearer for Iranian film since the late eighties, and himself acted as mentor to various directors of the next generation, the most famous of which is undoubtedly Jafar Panahi. He’s best known in the west for the trouble he got into with the authorities that he documented guerrilla style in the satirical documentary This is Not a Film. Before that he’d met with critical acclaim with Dayereh, Crimson Gold and Offside, but before any of them we have The White Balloon. It was written by Kiarostami, as if one needed reminding of the continuity.
The plot is as usual less interesting than the treatment. All we have is seven year old Razieh, on New Year’s Eve, desperate to get a goldfish to celebrate the festival, and finally convincing her mother to give her the money. The goldfish will, we’re told, be 100 tomans, but her mother only has a 500 toman note. Off she skips with the note in her goldfish jar. We just know it’s not going to go to plan.
Panahi had worked only the year before on Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, in which he appeared as himself. The location may be different, but it’s very much part of the same cinematic world. On one level one is tempted to look beyond the little girl’s losing and trying to retrieve her money, while on another Panahi and Kiarostami make that simple premise seem like a matter of life and death. It’s because we know of her naivety towards the dangers of the outside world – the various crooked sellers and snake charmers of the bazaar – that we fear for her. Yet don’t think that her dress, red and white like the protagonist of a fairy tale, is a coincidence. As for the titular balloon, it’s not so much significant as the potential bridge, the continuity if you like, to another film that was never made. In the last moments the girl and her story become peripheral and the camera rests on the young balloon seller who’d helped them. The last image is of his white balloon, but the balloon is for ‘another day’. It leaves you wondering about his story, and then it ends. Most western audiences, conditioned to accept cinematic junk food, will probably give a similar reaction to the title of Panahi’s later film and mutter “this is not a movie.” But I assure you it is, and of a type cinema would do well to notice.
This is a tremendous film and a splendid essay from Allan. There’s something rather perfect about this film. It covers a story of a girl who has one thing on her mind and her whole world is that goldfish and that money she needs to buy it. I see everyday in my own house how my little daughters can be so consumed by one train of thought that there is almost nothing you can do to snap them out of it. I see this same thing in this film. What’s amazing is how the mother lets the girl roam the streets on her own! True, the girl is rather tough, however if I were the parent I probably wouldn’t have let that happen. Lol
Yes a very great film, one of the best from that region of the world. And a banner review here from Allan by any barometer of measurement!