Jafar Panahi’s Three Faces begins with a suicide video that may or not be real. A well-known actress, Behnaz Jafari (played by herself), has been sent, via Panahi (also playing himself), a self-recorded video by a young woman, Marziyeh (Marziyeh Rezai), who tells the camera that she’s going to kill herself because her family won’t allow her to study at the Tehran drama conservatory. Marziyeh addresses Jafari directly – she’s tried to contact her but all of her messages have been ignored and so she has run away from home, terrified of her parents. Suicide, she says, is the only option left to her. The veracity of this clip – filmed on a trembling iPhone camera that drops to the ground at the critical moment when, with her head in a noose, Marziyeh kicks the stool away from her – is continually doubted. Jafari, visibly disturbed, tells Panahi that she never received anything from her, and there’s a note of irritation in her voice that is far from sympathy. Later, after Jafari and Panahi have set off in the direction of Marziyeh’s small mountain village with the intention of finding out whether the video is real or not, she watches the clip again and this time says, loud enough for us and Panahi to hear her: “little bitch”.
Her irritation is interesting and is grounded in two things. First, Jafari believes that the video isn’t real. She’s distressed by the content, and the accusation that Marziyeh has made against her – that she’s ignored her pleas for help – but the quest that she and Panahi are on is carried out with the intention of proving the video wrong, rather than of making amends for any possible wrongdoing. Like many great works of Iranian cinema, Three Faces is a meditation on reality and film. Panahi and Jafari heatedly discuss whether or not the phone video sent to them is authentic or not, using the language of editing with the finesse of two people who have spent their entire lives making fiction. And although the device motivating their quest seems implausible, the suicide video evokes just enough contemporary anxieties surrounding phones and virtual space – of unwanted contact, uninvited guests, unasked for responsibilities – to include the audience in the lurching fear that Marziyeh might really be dead. If she is, then how could she have sent the video? Who helped her? Jafari’s producer has called around, contacted the local morgues, and there’s no trace of the girl. Another observation: the village where she’s from is so remote that there would be no chance of finding a good editor there, which, Panahi observes, decreases the possibility that the footage is manipulated and the hanging staged.
As their car climbs up a snaking mountain road, Jafari begins to suspect Panahi of manipulating her into secretly making a film – and this is amusing because of course he is making a film, despite the governmental ban on his filmmaking and another classic Panahi denial, and she’s in on it too – remembering something about a script and a suicide. On reaching Marziyeh’s village they inspect the local graveyard, with the loose intention of seeing if there’s anything new, and find an old woman lying in her grave, who tells them that she’s testing it out (a comic nod to Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry). Jafari finds this scene wholly unconvincing. She accuses Panahi – “It’s all a set-up!” – prompting a spectacular sulk and his exit from the car. Jafari drives beside him as he walks with wounded majesty down into the village, pleading with him to forgive her. Are people who work in film more suspicious of reality? She can’t help it, and it’s easy to suspect Panahi, with his calm affability, of being up to something (and he certainly knows how to parody male pride). But when they track down Marziyeh’s house and meet her worried mother and incoherently hysterical younger brother, and discover that she has been missing for three days, both Panahi and Jafari begin to pale.
Three Faces is a quietly feminist tract that considers the relationships between women and the limited freedom that they have in traditional, patriarchal set-ups such as in Marziyeh’s native village. The second cause of Jafari’s irritation is more subtle than the first – she’s angry because she’s been dragged into a dispute that isn’t her own but in which she is obliged to play a part. Marziyeh reaches out to Jafari, as a successful actress and independent woman, to help liberate her from her oppressive family, to tell them that an actress doesn’t have to be disgraced and a woman can move to the city away from the orbit of her male family members. In her eagerness to discredit Marziyeh and disown any responsibility for her plight, Jafari is intensely familiar. When they find her alive, after all, Jafari slaps her and leaves. She says she’s angry at Marziyeh’s manipulative tactics, but when Marziyeh points out that the faked suicide video was the only way to make her actually come, she’s probably correct and Jafari can’t muster up a convincing denial. Though we initially attribute the three faces of the film’s title to Marziyeh, Jafari and Panahi, the presence of an older, pre-revolutionary female actress, Shahrazade, who is also alienated from the other villagers and with whom Marziyeh hides, becomes more important, as Three Faces considers the chains of generational responsibility between women. Jafari means to leave the village but feels guilty – she returns for Marziyeh and Panahi, rightfully, takes a back seat.
“Everything falls apart without rules,” one of the older villagers tells Panahi, but the logic of the village is unyielding and holds them back. Panahi’s sulking is met with a greater sulk: when they reach the centre of the village people crowd around him and Jafari, thrilled to be in the presence of well-known public figures, but when they reveal that they are looking for “empty-headed” Marziyeh, the men and women turn away from them with disenchanted grumbling. Although their encounters in the village are charming, light-hearted, and the people likeable, they are underpinned by darker implications about the nature of control and the limited freedom of women. When they first drive up into the village an old man makes Panahi honk the horn of car several times – later the same man explains that the road to the village is only big enough to allow one car to pass at a time; the villagers use this system of honking as a secret language to negotiate this difficulty and he seems proud with the ingenuity of it all. But Marziyeh later tells Panahi that she had wanted to expand the road in order to let two cars pass at the same time – the male villagers dismissed her as a woman and with this, the possibility of innovation and change. Throughout Three Faces, Panahi cleverly builds on the significance of earlier encounters, revealing how a light comedy is a gloss for something deeper, not so funny after all. In the second half of the film a sick bull lying in the middle of the road is a formal parallel for the old woman in her grave, but in this iteration there’s a man with a phone pressed to one ear calling for help. When Panahi stops, the waiting farmer regales him with a long digression about the bull and his virility, the sexual glories of his past. This, along with a hilarious circumcision story, creates a sense of a masculinity that is treasured, treated fondly – the antithesis of the scorn heaped on Marziyeh and Shahrazade.
Although Shahrazade is the ‘third face’ of the film – the motif of three women, like furies or fates, is as old as our history – we never see her. When Jafari returns to talk to Marziyeh, the two of them go to Shahrazade’s house and Panahi waits in the car, even sleeping there. Our perspective is necessarily limited to his – as the filmmaker – and so we participate in this respectful distance. When Jafari brings him food in the car she tells Panahi that Shahrazade is upset over the way she was treated in her career, describing the often abusive behaviour of male film directors. It’s possibly due to this that she doesn’t come and see him, that he’s excluded from the house, although the limited size of the building is given as the ostensible excuse. The most Panahi ever sees of Shahrazade is her back, as she paints in the morning, and this image is delivered fugitively. In the film’s final scene, Marziyeh runs after Jafari as she walks ahead down the narrow road, and he waits and watches in the car – we do not hear what is said between them. It’s to Panahi’s credit that the second half of the film is surrendered to the women and their secret conversations – Three Faces is a subtle and beautiful exploration of female relationships without men told through the limited perspective of the excluded man, who offers a gentle and incisive look at the necessity of his own exclusion.
