On demand: "3 Faces"

Here is the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, out of the house he's been confined to in his previous film-dispatches, but still working within clear limitations on a story of containment. 3 Faces opens with the narrow frame of a video message self-taped by an aspiring actress: in it, she regales us with the sorry story of how she was accepted into drama school, only for her family to deny her that freedom, and why this has led her to hang herself in a cave outside a remote rural village. (It has the look of those truthbombs that rapidly circulate online in the wake of tragedy.) Thereafter, we follow Panahi (playing himself) and the actress friend who received the video (Behnaz Jafari) as they drive around in what may be the same car that carried this director through 2015's Taxi Tehran, trying to locate the source and establish the veracity of this distress call. Along the way, they stop to take semi-improvised contributions from passing locals, who redirect our seekers and add dashes of local colour, poetry and superstition, but also - through words and gestures - hint at the tyranny everybody's living under. As several of the men dismiss the actresses of this narrative as "empty-headed entertainers", we are reminded once more that the artist poses a particular problem to any overbearing regime, devoted as they are to self-expression, and to a wider acknowledgement of their circumstances. Panahi has oft been championed as an artist for his bravery in repeatedly putting himself and his work out there, but the fictional Panahi within the film is himself engaged in what automatically strikes the eye as outright heroism: even as his own status in the eyes of the authorities is unclear, he embarks upon a quest to save another life hanging perilously in the balance.

The film's mystery elements - is the tape real or fake? Is the girl alive or dead? - don't develop quite as we initially expect. (If anything, they lead us somewhere only more surprising and enlightening.) What we're driven to notice en route, however, is how this particular aesthetic has evolved to reflect the situation in today's Iran. Panahi and Jafari's inquiries carry them down the same long and winding roads Kiarostami once travelled along, and play out in the same realist, even self-reflexive key that was a feature of Iranian cinema in the late 20th century. But when Jafari brings up the screenplay about suicide Panahi once invited her to collaborate on, it's as if art has been superceded by harried reality - and that sense of threat and urgency is precisely what's new here. These fables are no longer as pretty nor as precious as they once were; they appear less interested in art than they do reportage. Panahi's characters may well be on the move, but they're still largely confined to the safe-ish space of the car - and they're on the move because someone or something is snapping at their heels. Panahi wouldn't be the first artist in late middle-age to start seeing death everywhere: his encounters here include a passing chat with an old woman testing the grave dug for her, and a pause caused by an exhausted cow who's laid down to expire in the very middle of the one road connecting this village to the rest of the world.

Yet the circumstances of living under suspicion in the Iran of 2018 means Panahi is left wondering what kind of death awaits him: where and when, how far or near, and whether it can possibly be of his own choosing. The good news, in as much as 3 Faces has good news to report: Panahi continues to counter these dire thoughts - and the suppressive iron fist of the powers-that-be - via the almost unthinkably light touch he himself demonstrates with regard to his performers. Again here, there are long stretches that could easily be mistaken for documentary investigation, but also a monologue about bull's testicles that reveals a stubbornly macho worldview, a comically absurd subplot about the transport of a foreskin removed during circumcision, and occasional explosions of rage to remind us exactly what's at stake. The approach extends to Panahi's carefully cultivated yet lightly worn onscreen persona: that of the bemused observer, fumbling his way haphazardly towards truth. Yet only a truly clear-sighted creative could arrive at a film this panoramic in its representation of a society, and 3 Faces's brilliant, deftly coded, wholly resonant closing images bear this out: a fleeting glimpse of the artist confined to semi-obscurity in a distant field, and a much longer shot of market forces - and what's already been established as a draining status quo - coming up the road to reassert themselves.

3 Faces is currently streaming on the iPlayer, and available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema and YouTube.