Sensing a change of wind direction, the artful, politic Kiarostami had spent much of the 1990s drifting further into the Iranian countryside, seeking material that was either abstract or fabular: the stuff it's always much easier to get past the censors. Panahi would eventually be forced out that way, too, but around the millennium, he was making life harder for himself by remaining in the heart of the city, shooting lived reality and having his characters zig and zag between public spaces and backalleys. (Some shoots require built-in escape routes.) The Circle, co-written with Kambuzia Partovi, was a compendium of women's stories, presenting as either a doomy Arabian Nights or an A-grade on the Bechdel test. It opens with the sound of a new mother giving birth and the sight of a grandmother aghast that the child is a girl and not the desired boy, then falls into the orbit of a trio of young women - one of whom has barely registered before she's carted off by police - attempting to shepherd their youngest, who has a conspicuous (and never explained) black eye, on a bus out of town. From the off, it's a motion picture because its characters have to keep moving. We pick up some of their reasons as they go, but we grasp far more of the restrictions imposed upon them: they can't smoke (as their male counterparts can), they can't travel as freely as they'd hope, those movements are limited at every turn by the authorities, and doors are often openly slammed in their face. In the film's most terrifying sequence, two men on a bike burst into a family home housing a woman who's just been released from custody; God (or Allah) knows what's going on behind that closed door, but it's as forceful a metaphor as any for what was going on inside this country under this regime, away from the eyes of the world. As in most compendiums, certain stories here prove more immediately compelling than others, but the underlying insinuation of that title - a narrative route map that could just as easily describe a void - is bracing: this Iran is a country where it would be very easy for people - and for women, in particular - to disappear, never to be seen, filmed or heard from again.
Crimson Gold, Panahi's first out-and-out masterpiece, is in itself a circle, albeit in the Dantean sense. It opens with a botched jewel heist shot in such a way as to suggest that what's going on outside is at least as important as what's going on inside; from its arresting first moments, it's a thriller with more than half an eye on 21st century Iran. The task Panahi and Kiarostami (here on screenwriting duties) set themselves, in the extended flashback that follows, is to explain how the heavy-set robber Hossein (Hossein Emadeddin) got here, and was driven to take his own life at the scene of the crime. (An alternative title quickly suggests itself: No Way Out.) When we rejoin him, Hossein is a lowly pizza delivery driver (and, we learn, military veteran) being pushed towards petty crime by the direness of his personal circumstances. Notionally, as a man, he has greater mobility than the women of The Circle: his scooter affords him and us ample scope to case various neighbourhoods - again, tantalising glimpses here of Tehran as it once was and could still be - and determine the best areas and places to stick up. But it's still finally not enough. When Hossein first shows up at the fateful jewellers, to get his engagement ring adjusted, the door is slammed in his face by the suspicious proprietor. When he finally gets inside as a customer - because he and his bride have dressed up for the occasion - they're obliged to wait while a couple with more money receive the full VIP treatment. (There's an argument that the jeweller, redirecting Hossein towards the cheap gold of a nearby bazaar, is asking for trouble.) It's a sorry and sorrowful state of affairs: as an older colleague who seeds the idea of robbery puts it, "if you want to arrest a thief, you'll have to arrest the world entire".
For the better part of ninety minutes, Panahi gets us to walk several miles in some old, worn-out shoes, and realise why someone might be driven to the end of their tether like this. In an early sequence, a broken lift obliges Hossein to climb four full flights of stairs to reach one customer's swanky apartment - and Panahi's camera tracks every weary, exhausted step. Even when our guy's doing his job, there's no guarantee of payment: one night, he gets caught up in a police crackdown on parties, affording him a front-row seat to state oppression (and the fun that forever appears several floors out of reach) while his pizzas turn cold in their box. Much of this fits the Manny Farber definition of termite art, scrabbling around unfussily at street level while somehow summoning an existential sense of despair: our weary footsoldier's conversation with the young cop carrying out orders could be Hamlet and the gravedigger, transposed to the Middle East. Emadeddin, who'd been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in real life, reportedly made life hell for Panahi during filming, but his casting is key to the whole film. Hossein is kind of a stooge - someone who wants what he cannot have, as made clear by his late-film interactions with the misogynist rich kid who seems like an Iranian equivalent of Jeremy the landlord in Mike Leigh's Naked - and even if his instincts and impulses become more legible as the film proceeds, he does look like someone carrying a far greater burden than mere margaritas, who might at any moment retreat into sullen immobility or start throwing his weight around. Unlike De Niro in Taxi Driver, however, he's not entirely putting this on. The Iranian authorities knew they couldn't cut Crimson Gold, because it was oppositional to its very bones; instead, they refused it a theatrical release, rendering it ineligible for Academy Award consideration among other slights. Soon, they'd be targeting not just the films, but the man who made them. What we know now is that Panahi not only endured this persecution, he outlived his persecutor-in-chief: you do wonder what he's feeling this week, heading to America for the Oscars with his country in the state it now is.
The Circle and Crimson Gold are now streaming on MUBI.
