Writer-director Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces begins with phone camera footage of a young woman filming her own suicide. It’s upsetting and it’s understandable when the actress for whom the video is intended, Behnaz Panahi (an Iranian film/TV star who plays herself), leaves a set in the middle of filming to go to the girl’s remote village to make sure the video isn’t a hoax. On the surface, Panahi’s film–in which he also plays himself–is a meandering, episodic odyssey about a director and an actress trying to unravel a mystery, but that plot is really a delivery system for something far more meaningful.
We’ll get to that later, though. The first thing that actually strikes you about 3 Faces is the way director of photography, Amin Jafari, films it. Though the initial phone camera footage plays in one, unbroken take, the rest of the film unfolds in much the same way. For long stretches, the camera is mounted to a car’s dashboard or trained on a fixed point in the distance. Every once in awhile, it pans to one side or the other, slowly and deliberately capturing conversations between both Panahis (no relation) as they drive to the girl’s (Marziyeh Rezaei) village. The shots are deliberate and could easily become boring if not for two reasons.
The first is how beautiful the landscape often is. In one long take, Jafar looks at a house from afar as Behnaz goes inside. Initially, the image is beautiful because of the wide view it gives us of the landscape. We see Jafar’s back in the foreground, the scrub brush and sand in the middle distance and the house all the way in the back. But then the sun begins to set in real time and suddenly, we can see the silhouettes of Behnaz and the other people in the house through the window. It’s as if Panahi has conspired with nature itself to emphasize how much we want to know what the women in that house are saying.
That moment is calm and steady, sneaking up on you with its complexity, but most of the time, what happens in the frame is so chaotic or strange that the deliberate camera movements feel grounding. Much of that is thanks to the people the Panahis meet in Marziyeh’s village. They’re intentionally unrealistic, meant often as almost comedic parodies of certain types. There’s the country philosopher who speaks in platitudes, the angry brother who is so mad about Marziyeh’s desire to go to an acting conservatory that his mother has to lock him in the house and there’s the overly-hospitable woman who spends an entire scene getting food and tea for the Panahis only for them to leave without touching it.
Perhaps the strangest scene, though, comes when one of the villagers stops Behnaz and asks her to do him a favor. He tells her that, in accordance with local tradition, he attempted to bury his first son’s foreskin near a palace in order to give him a good future—something he was jailed and beaten for attempting. But he’s kept the foreskin since and he begs her to give it to the “virile” actor who starred in the first movie he saw after his release, Behrouz Vossoughi. Behnaz explains that neither she nor Panahi can meet with the actor, however, because he’s exiled, but the man insists. It’s a strange, seemingly random encounter, but it actually ties into the film’s true point.
Though much of 3 Faces seems like a mystery thriller filled with weird but memorable minor characters, it’s not really clear what Panahi is trying to explore until the film is nearly over. Those titular faces belong to three women at very different stages in their acting careers. Marziyeh’s has not even begun, but she so desperately wants to break out of her rigid upbringing that she seems willing to kill herself rather than be doomed to a marriage she doesn’t actually want. Behnaz is at the height of her stardom, worshipped by the normal people she meets and accused of being hysterical by the industry people whose schedule she ruins by daring to make sure she hasn’t inadvertently caused a young girl’s suicide. And then there’s Shahrzad (whose real name is Kobra Saeedi), a star from before the Iranian Revolution who hasn’t been allowed to work since and who is essentially being shunned by the town—almost like Norma Desmond.
While Panahi may not be an actress himself, he’s also forbidden from making films in Iran, and his empathy for their circumstances permeates the script. He was inspired to make it after reading an upsetting Instagram message from a fan and an unrelated report that a young woman killed herself because she was forbidden from making movies. And while those circumstances are specific to their country, they also feel universal. There’s something painfully familiar in the way the villagers repeatedly dismiss Marziyeh as “empty-headed” for wanting to go to the acting conservatory or, particularly post-#MeToo, the way Shahrzad refuses to let Panahi into her home because the directors she worked with treated her so poorly.
3 Faces may be made up of long, beautiful pans and one strange side adventure after another, but its real subject is the misogyny the titular actresses face. The village may be small and remote, but the way it treats its women is a microcosm of the country and the world. Where Marziyeh’s brother becomes violent at the thought of her going to school, another villager went to jail and lovingly preserved his son’s foreskin for 38 years in hopes that he could influence his destiny. Sometimes the obstacles blocking a woman’s path to fulfillment are as small as an injured bull and sometimes, it’s centuries of tradition and history. Panahi’s film examines the latter so subtly and slowly, that when it finally ends, it’s hard not to feel the weight of that struggle too.
Rating: 7.5/10
