Pitch gender battles in Iran
Khaled Diab
October 2006
According to Iranian law, football
stadiums are off bounds to women, renowned Iranian director Jafar Panahi
discovered when his daughter once asked if she could come along to a football
match with him. This, he told the audience at the 33rd Gent International Film
Festival, was the inspiration for his film Offside.
This surreal ban provided Panahi with the
springboard to explore issues of gender, equality and the status of women in
modern-day Iran in an entertaining, funny and touching storyline.
Speaking through an interpreter, the
controversial director talked about the challenges of shooting during an actual
match, using first-time non-professional actors, and actually filming in the
stadium on the same day as many women were refused entry to watch their
national side play.
Caught in the
act
The film’s plot revolves around the adventures
of half a dozen football-mad young women – of varying degrees of confidence and
assertiveness – and the antics they employ to sneak into Tehran’s main stadium
in order to watch Iran’s World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain.
Although they were undoubtedly not the only
women in the stadium, they were certainly the only ones who got caught. They
all disguised themselves as young male soccer fans, except for one who came up
with the novel idea of dressing up as an army conscript and even made it into
the stands reserved for the forces, which is where she got caught.
The match kicks off and the girls are biding
their time in a makeshift holding area on the outer side of the stands awaiting
the arrival of the police commander. To a woman, they are itching to watch the
action on the football field and implore the soldier in charge to allow them to
peek through the gate at the game. Their frustration mounts with every cheer
and gasp emitted by the crowd.
The conscript in charge is not interested in
football and is deaf to their pleas. When his assistant gets distracted by the
match and starts jumping around and yelling advice and commands to the players,
the girls convince the hapless young man to give them a running commentary – to
hilarious effect.
Manwhile, the only thought on the senior
soldier’s one-track mind is his desire to finish the last few weeks of his
conscription without any delays brought about through reckless disobedience.
One of the more memorable lines of the film is his exacerbated exclamation at
the waywardness of those liberal women from the capital: “I don’t understand
you Tehran women, one of you wants to join the army and the other wants to play
football for the Iranian national side.”
The human face
of prejudice
His mantra of returning to his land and animals
becomes so ingrained into the young womens’ consciousness that one of them, who
managed to give his assistant the slip during a surreal and farcical visit to
the evacuated toilets (only men’s toilets are available in the stadium),
returns because “I felt sorry for his animals”, she tells the other girls.
And her sympathy for his predicament reveals
the complexities of the situation. The young man in the soldier’s uniform is
not a bad man. He is well-meaning but simply does not possess the strength of
personality, imagination, or intellectual and moral daring to challenge the
status quo. His intuitive good nature is revealed in a couple of telling
scenes, such as his intervention to stop an angry father from striking his
daughter, his borrowing money to buy drinks for all the young women in his
charge because one of them complained of being thirsty, and his hanging out of
the police van to hold the broken antenna in the optimal position so that the
young ladies could listen to the match.
Actually, many of the football fans in the film
secretly abetted and assisted the women in their quest to enter the stadium by
keeping quite or obstructing one soldier’s path as he chased the girl who
escaped from the toilet.
It is this human angle that is often missing
from the discourse of western critics of ‘Islam’ and self-proclaimed
‘reformers’. They do not seem to appreciate that many Muslim women, for
whatever reasons of social and ideological expectation, regard their status as
equal to men’s but different and embrace the hijab and other symbols of
faith through conviction and not coercion. Although the growing ranks of Muslim
women who do not accept their traditional status have a tough challenge ahead,
there are others who are quite happy in their traditional roles and the idea of
change actually fills them with apprehension and dread. These critics forget
that the relative gender equality in the west was arrived at through a long and
painful process, and that societies like Iran need to find their own way along
this path.
Under the Shah, Iran told women to dress in
western styles. Now the Islamic Republic tells its women to wear the chador.
But Iranian society’s attempt to dictate women’s appearance is not only futile
and unfair exercise but is doomed to failure. Likewise, western countries
should refrain from following France and Turkey’s example and forcing their own
dress code on Muslim women. If Muslim women are to discard the veil in all its
forms, this has to be done through conviction and not coercion.
Exploring
contradictions
Exposing the social contradictions in Iran, the
most assertive of the girls asks the soldier-in-chief: “Why is it we are
allowed to go to the cinema with men but we are not allowed to come to the
football stadium?”
“That’s different,” he protests, not quite sure
why. “The stadium is no place for a woman. Football supporters are obscene and
swear a lot.”
“Well, the cinema is dark,” the young woman
counters, stumping him.
At the end of the day, football proves to be
the great equaliser and Iran’s victory over Bahrain is announced as the young
women are being driven to the vice squad offices. Caught up in the spontaneous
street party, the soldiers and their charges are pulled out by the jubilant
crowd and they all let their hair down metaphorically and join in the revelry.
The film closes on this high.
This scene echoed Iran’s win over the USA in
the 1998 World Cup. “Here was a bold, defiant demonstration of the power of the
masses, and of their youth, in the face of rigid authority, and authority had
backed down,” wrote American journalist Elaine Sciolino in her book Persian
mirrors – the elusive face of Iran. “For one glorious summer night,
ordinary Iranians proved themselves capable of bursting out of their lethargy
not for God, but for soccer.”
Panahi’s film is currently banned in Iran but,
he confessed smilingly, it has done very well on the unofficial underground
circuit. He also hoped that, like other one-time controversial films, the
censor would one day allow it to be shown in cinemas.
To my mind, Panahi, in his sympathetic and
unorthodox cinematic treatment of women and the tough challenges they face in
contemporary Iran, is the Almodovar of Iranian cinema – minus the explicit sex
and transsexuals.
Nevertheless, that does not mean he shies away
from questions of sexuality, as his 2000 film Dayreh (The Circle)
clearly demonstrates. In it, he follows the lives and destinies of several
down-and-out women trying to survive on the margins of the man’s world of
Iranian society. Several of the women are former, current or escaped prison
inmates. Prostitution and sexual exploitation make up a central theme of this
dark film, with some characters forced by their circumstances to trade sexual
favours or wrongly accused of prostitution for being out alone late at night.
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archives
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