Aspect Ratio: 1.85 widescreen
Colour: Colour
Sound: Stereo
Camera: Digital
Synopsis
It opens with Marziyeh Rezaei on her mobile phone screen making an emotional video addressed to famous actress Behnaz Jafari which appears to end with her suicide.
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi who recieves the video thinks it seems genuine and he and Behnaz drive to the mountains in the north where Marziyeh says she lives to try and find out what has happened.
Reviews
by rogerco on Tue 20th Dec 2022 DVD proj @ home (Subtitled)
Strange, but again unsatisfying
Full review
It starts by concentrating on two faces, for the first few minutes we only see Marziyeh filming herself talking to camera, then we cut to Behnaz's face for a few minutes as she is in Jafari's car heading north and they are discussing the video.
It then opens out to more conventional shots as they get near the village, but the people they encounter seem alien to my western eyes and their motives and meanings are unclear. As the truth about Marziyeh unfolds through her family and friend, Maedeh (?), we see an ancient self contained community living in what seem tumbledown homes and the incipient conflict between the pressure of the modern and the rock of community and culture.
In the end Marziyeh does 'escape' with Behnaz and Jafari - but isn't she escaping to a more gilded and less substantial cage? Perhaps this is the meaning of the unseen third face of the old pre-revolution actress who has retired to live alone and isolated in the village and who has befriended Marizyeh..