The White Balloon
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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En route to the store, however, she manages to lose the banknote twice, and the remainder of the movie, about 70 minutes, is devoted to her efforts to get it back again. If this sounds slight in terms of plot, it must be added that the film as a whole can be seen as both light and heavy–fun and easy to take as well as engrossing–though seeing it exclusively as light entertainment does it an injustice. For one thing, the immense importance of the banknote and the fish to Razieh is never shied away from, and part of the movie’s achievement is getting us to share enough of her viewpoint and emotions to make these things seem important to us. For another thing–and this is complexly tied up with the preceding project–The White Balloon reinvents time and our moment-to-moment perception of it, an accomplishment that’s anything but slight. To say that Panahi has served up the universe in a teacup makes the film sound overblown and pretentious, and it’s anything but. Yet it certainly is a universe–a densely realized space-time continuum suggesting both a picaresque novel and a piece of music–that taught me a lot more about the flow of time in everyday life than anything I’ve seen lately from Hollywood.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is of watching a bird building a nest, piece by piece, on a ledge outside a room where I was staying in my grandparents’ house. Part of what makes this memory so vivid is how completely it transformed my sense of time passing: duration became a matter not of how long I was sitting by the window but of how long it took a bird to construct a nest–which made everything else that happened in the vicinity during the same period relatively unimportant, a series of distractions.
Critics who describe this movie as fluff or as conventional realism–and a surprising number do, even some of the film’s more enthusiastic partisans–have to ignore a good deal of what happens to arrive at such conclusions. They have to overlook such peculiarities as the sound editing, which periodically foregrounds the radio reports about how much time remains before the New Year–reports that, unless I missed something, are never accompanied by any visible radio. They have to repress Panahi’s formal decision to shoot all the action in the streets and alleys of a small patch of Tehran, apart from the airy interiors of a couple of shops–which places domestic interiors out of bounds (comparable to the ground rules of Jacques Rivette’s 1980 Le pont du nord, though its exclusive use of exteriors was “justified” by the claustrophobia of the central character, who’s just emerged from a long stint in prison)–and some of the strange consequences of that decision: for instance, we never see Razieh and Ali’s father, even though we hear him. These critics also have to overlook the highly unconventional swerve in the film’s narrative trajectory that ultimately leaves us not with Razieh or Ali, who run off to join their parents, but with an Afghan balloon seller (Aliasghar Samadi), who becomes an important character only in the film’s final act.
Kiarostami founded the film unit at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults–a state-supported organization started in the late 60s by the shah’s wife that’s now known as the Kanun–and it has produced practically all of his films to date. Not all of these films are, strictly speaking, children’s films, and some are documentaries; but most of them feature children, and in many respects they establish a particular kind of filmmaking that The White Balloon exemplifies: loosely scripted narratives with documentary elements that employ mainly nonprofessional actors. One technique developed by Kiarostami that Panahi adopts is keeping the overall story a secret from the actors–especially the child actors–to ensure the spontaneity of their performances.
My quarrel with this kind of analysis–which goes on to criticize The White Balloon for not even attempting to challenge, even cautiously, “the ubiquitous imagery of chador-clad women, fulfilling their traditional roles”–is that it places an outsize requirement on filmmakers like Panahi that most Western critics would never dream of placing on Western filmmakers. Though I share Louvish’s indignation about the enslavement of Iranian women, obliging every Iranian filmmaker to address this subject implies another (albeit less direct) form of enslavement–and one that costs the Western critic nothing.
