Back in the late 1970s, the so-called Cinema of Moral Anxiety anticipated the rebellious spirit of Polish society in the run-up to the formation of the Solidarity trade union. It would be tempting to suggest that Iranian film-makers are currently reflecting a similar undercurrent of popular discontent, as so many recent releases have explored subjects that would previously have been considered taboo within the Islamic Republic. Urban poverty, prostitution, drug addiction, student fascination with Western influences and the status of women have all been explored in features that been granted export licences by a regime supposedly as strict as the pre-glasnost Communists.
So does the fact that films like Jafar Panahi's astonishingly courageous satire Offside got made at all signify the emergence of an Iranian Cinema of Social Acuity, or should we read more into the fact that the picture's international acclaim led to Teheran tightening its attitudes to female access to football?
Forthright, funny and fascinating, Offside is one of filmic football's finest hours. Yet, in following a group of young women disguising themselves as men in order to gain illegal access to a crucial World Cup qualifier against Bahrain, Jafar Panahi's satire also provides a courageous insight into the extent of institutionalised chauvinism in Iran and the rising tide of juvenile disquiet against Islamic stricture. Moreover, by having the unmasked girls guarded by a unit of reluctant rural recruits (who know far less about football than their prisoners), Panahi succeeds in exploring a range of wider social issues without losing sight of the unifying power of sport that proves vital to the exhilarating (if somewhat contrived) denouement, in which a celebrating crowd engages in an act of spontaneous defiance. Superbly played by a non-professional ensemble, this is an intriguing glimpse at the realities that seem to exist behind the propaganda issued by both Teheran and its Western opponents.
The authoritarian grip of Beijing is similarly called to question in Johnnie To's Election, as the assimilation of Hong Kong into China appears to have had little impact on the potency of the Triads. With its simmering sense of latent violence and authentic insights into the workings of the Hong Kong underworld, this compelling crime drama makes a twin virtue of its complexity and restraint. Atmospherically photographed by Cheng Siu-keung, the struggle between Simon Yam and Tony Leung Ka-fai for the wooden baton that symbolises control over the territory's oldest and most powerful gang, the Wo Shing Society, thrums with conspiratorial menace and psychotic corruption.
Yet, To retains a level of brutal civility that is almost unique to turf war thrillers and, consequently, the blood-letting seems all the more shocking when it inevitably arrives. The intensity dips slightly after the cops intervene, but To rallies his impeccable ensemble for a pitiless resolution that splendidly sets up the forthcoming sequel.
The crime is more disorganised in Jonathan Jakubowicz's Secuestro Express, a belligerent drama that centres on the spate of quickie kidnappings in which moderate ransoms are demanded to tight deadlines that has become a sinister part of the Venezuelan class conflict. But rather than forcing us to identify with either the affluent abductees, Mia Maestro and Jean Paul Leroux, or the lowlife perpetrators, Carlos Julio Molina, Pedro Perez and Carlos Madera, the screenplay blurs the lines so that it's never totally clear who is the real victim.
The exposure of the cowardly Leroux is undoubtedly amusing. But Maestro's bid to bond with the gang is less persuasive and the drop sequence involving her father, Ruben Blades, feels forced. However, Jakubowicz makes tense and atmospheric use of his nocturnal Caracas locations and he sketches in the trio's mixed motives for their criminality with a sensitivity and insight that was missing from Tony Scott's similarly themed Mexican thriller, Man on Fire.
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