A road movie that opens into a political allegory, “3 Faces” is filled with unexpected turns. It is the latest from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, a master of narrative diversion, who again has taken the twinned roles of director and driver, as he did in the documentary “Taxi” (2015). Here, playing himself, or a version of filmmaker Jafar Panahi, he spends a large part of the movie behind the wheel of an SUV, motoring through the Iranian countryside to help an actress find a missing, possibly dead woman. They succeed but also find other women, including one who’s a ghost in a haunted world.
The story is streamlined, simple and elegant, but the plot is thickly layered. The actress, Behnaz Jafari, has received a video of a distraught young woman, Marziyeh Rezaei, who seems to have killed herself on camera. (The main performers share their names with their characters.) The shaken Behnaz has walked away from her latest role mid-production and enlisted Jafar to help her search for Marziyeh. Their quest takes them to northwest Iran, where he speaks Turkish to Azeri villagers. He and Behnaz easily track down the missing woman, a discovery that enriches and complicates the inevitable gender divide that runs through this movie like a volatile fault line.
Panahi’s storytelling is direct, even obvious, and his visual approach looks similarly straightforward to the point of being utilitarian. But little is as it first appears in “3 Faces,” including the short, alarming video of Marziyeh killing herself that dominates the movie’s opening scenes. A teary, visibly shaken Behnaz repeatedly watches the video as Jafar drives, offering a running commentary on it. She’s flooded with despair, anger, confusion and guilt, but can’t stop watching it, perhaps especially because Marziyeh makes an on-camera appeal to Behnaz for help that now feels like an accusation. In becoming the video’s audience, the actress has become inescapably complicit.
That’s true of every audience, of course, including the one for “3 Faces,” simply because to watch a movie is to engage in a social act, whether in a theater or at home. Here, though, the suggestion of complicity doesn’t feel like an accusation, the way it can with directors who toss Brechtian brickbats. A humanist in a theocracy, Panahi has long explored social and political issues — poverty, women’s rights, authoritarianism — yet without the tiresome art-house wagging fingers and grandstanding. One characteristic of his work is its anguished tenderness, including in movies that play with hard-boiled genre (“Crimson Gold,” “The Circle”), a generosity of spirit that is itself political.
Behnaz’s doubts about Marziyeh’s video foreshadow the subjects teased out in the main story, including the sometimes convenient divide between fiction and documentary, performance and what we call real life. Panahi has long explored the protean space between these modes, testing their boundaries. In “3 Faces,” he is at once playing a role in a fiction and himself: a dissident filmmaker with a privileged, sympathetic view of women, which strengthens the movie’s autobiographical underpinning. Panahi was arrested in Iran in 2009 and again in 2010. Accused of making anti-regime propaganda, he was forbidden to leave and barred from making movies for 20 years; this is the fourth feature he’s made since.
The result is an immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor. The intimate claustrophobia of the SUV is an emblem of the larger interior-exterior divide faced by all the characters, particularly the women. When Behnaz exits the vehicle, she isn’t just a restless passenger; she is also an autonomous Iranian woman. Jafar’s presence — or rather Panahi’s — is similarly meaningful, given that he’s forbidden to leave Iran. So, he drives and makes movies, and throughout this one he uses the SUV’s windshield and windows to throw a frame around the world, an insistent reminder of his identity, his art, his vision.
After miles of dusty road, phone calls and character-revealing bickering, Behnaz and Jafar reach a village that becomes the backdrop for much of the story. There, they meet assorted gentle eccentrics, each further enhancing the nubby realism. There’s an old woman (very much alive) nestled in her dug grave, and an old man who makes a present of a foreskin. Behnaz and Jafar also solve the mystery created by Marziyeh, whose family is in an uproar over her desire to become an actress. The question of a woman’s proper role — on-screen and off — becomes a steady refrain, particularly with the introduction of Shahrzad, a legendary actress and the movie’s third, most elusive face.
A village pariah, Shahrzad lives alone in a modest, isolated house and appears as a fugitive pretense: a silhouette in a window, a disembodied voice, a distant figure. But her presence fills the movie, partly because she serves as an affecting reminder of Iran’s past, much as the willful Marziyeh is an emissary of its future. Shahrzad also emerges as a kind of twin figure for Panahi, who has continued to make his art despite government censure. Working with modest means and astonishing determination, he makes movies that are at once acts of aesthetic will and of political resistance, as well as assertions of the existential sovereignty that here is etched in every last face.
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Added Information:
“3 Faces”
Not rated. In Persian and Azerbaijani, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.