Summary:
The White Balloon unfolds during the countdown to the New Year. The plot revolves around seven-year-old Razieh, who has her heart set on a particular goldfish. Goldfish are an essential element of a table of various items Iranians set out in celebration of the New Year, and Razieh is not satisfied with the ‘skinny’ fish her family cultivates in their yard. After managing to receive money from her mother for the fish, the film unfolds like an anxiety dream with a series of drawn-out obstacles standing in the way of Razieh and her goldfish.
Analysis:
The White Balloon (1995) is Jafar Panahi’s first feature film, with a screenplay by the better-known and celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami. Funded by Iranian sources, including the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Broadcasting Channel 2, the film was screened inside Iran but found its most enthusiastic audience abroad. Like his subsequent work such as The Mirror (1997), Circle (2000), Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006), Panahi’s The White Balloon was the recipient of international praise and awards. It also received critical acclaim inside Iran and was Iran’s official submission to the Academy Awards. However, the Iranian government later attempted to withdraw the nomination due to political tensions with the United States.
The White Balloon stands out as among the best known of a number of other Iranian films in the 1990s which signalled a revival of Iranian cinema. Following the 1979 Revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq that began within a year, the film industry suffered along with other sectors of Iranian society.1 With a few exceptions, such as Nader’s The Runner (1986), Beizai’s Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989), and Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s House (1987) and Close-Up (1990), the cinema of 1980s Iran was largely unremarkable. As the country eased into the relative stability of the post-war years following the August 1988 ceasefire, the possibilities for films and other forms of expression expanded. At the same time, films in particular and cultural production more broadly became a site of increasing political contestation. The result was a vibrant, if volatile, film industry.
Panahi’s work has been noted for its neo-realist aspects,2 and some of these elements are evident in The White Balloon. Employing a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, the majority of the action takes place in the main streets and back alleys of Tehran. The film is set in a working-class neighbourhood, and while the film revolves around the protagonist’s desire, rather than need, for a goldfish, the lengths she must go through to fulfil her wish for a fish that costs less than one dollar underscores the economic hardships of her family. Panahi does not gratuitously toy with the audience’s emotions; he avoids close-ups, and several long takes provide an occasional sense that one is watching an observational documentary. The opening sequence of the film provides one such example.
Approximately two minutes in length, the first long take of the film captures a busy Tehran street on the eve of the Iranian New Year celebration: a radio host stating that the New Year is one hour and 28 minutes away opens the film, and the announcement of the New Year’s arrival brings the film to a close, with the story time approximating the film’s run time. The excitement of the countdown to the New Year is intensified by the stress of the protagonist’s main obstacles. In the course of Razieh’s misadventures, Panahi reveals the diversity of Tehran and ultimately tells a touching tale about human connections in a big city. At the same time, the film provides subtle social commentary, a feature that becomes overt in his later films.
Razieh’s compounding difficulties in reaching her goldfish bring her into contact with a range of Tehran’s permanent and transient residents, providing Panahi the opportunity to show Tehran in all its strangeness and dynamism. First, snake charmers that her mother had warned against earlier take her money as part of their act for several stressful moments. Soon thereafter, she realises that she has lost her money after leaving the snake charmers for the fish store. Seconds after spotting the money with the help of a kindly, elderly woman who speaks Persian with a foreign accent, a motorcycle rushes by, pushing the bill – already precariously perched on a gutter – into the cellar below. Razieh’s nightmare continues for nearly another hour of screen time, as she tries to recover the money on her own and soon thereafter with her brother’s help. Others she encounters in her attempts to recover the money include the cranky tailor with a shop next to where the money was lost, a soldier on furlough who cannot afford to go home for the New Year, and the Afghan balloon vendor who is not much older than her and her brother and who is ultimately their salvation. As is apparent from their accented Persian, the tailor and the soldier are not Tehran natives, and the Afghan boy, though he may well have been born in the city, is marked as being on the margins of Iranian society.
It is the Afghan boy who obtains chewing gum for the kids, which they adhere to the bottom of the stick holding his balloon and successfully retrieve the money. After nearly an hour and a half of immersion in Razieh’s obstacle-ridden quest for the desired goldfish, the film does not end with the happy siblings rushing home to be with their family. Rather, it concludes with a focus on the Afghan boy, alone after Ali and Razieh buy their fish and pass him by without acknowledgement, much less an expression of gratitude for his help. Various characters introduced throughout the film also stroll by, likely heading out to join their loved ones for the turn of the New Year. The friendly shop owner whose cellar the money had fallen into but who had arrived after the children had already retrieved their money, pats the Afghan boy on the back and tells him that it is time to go home. But the boy does not budge, raising the question of what kind of home life – if any – he has. The film comes to a close with the Afghan vendor sitting alone with his single white balloon stirring almost imperceptibly as the clock ticking toward the New Year beats on. After the New Year is announced, he gets up; and this is where the film concludes, with the freeze frame of the boy turning to walk away.
In these last few seconds, Panahi manages to provide a new layer of complexity to his film. The audience has to this point been invested in Razieh’s fate. The lengths she has to go through to obtain the money for the goldfish, including bribing and then colluding with her brother, point to the family’s financial hardships. Her father, never seen but heard yelling and complaining from the shower early in the film, signals additional family tension. Talking to a soldier on furlough, while waiting for her brother to return with help for getting the money out of the gutter, Razieh tells him that her father has two jobs, one which she is allowed to speak about, and one which she is not. The unspeakable job both points to their financial problems and provides some explanation for the father’s bad disposition. It also leads the viewer to conclude that the bruise on Ali’s face is likely a result of the father’s ill temper.
Despite the difficulties they might face, the film’s conclusion suggests that others in their city fare worse. In the film’s opening scenes, their mother is shown with bags full of groceries and is later seen preparing the house for New Year; the siblings’ joyous run home indicates their excitement for the coming festivities. In contrast, the Afghan boy does not appear to have a place to go to. Present in the opening sequence with lots of balloons, he is down to the white one by the end: parents of happy children have presumably bought them in celebration of the New Year. The Afghan boy contributes to the festivities of the New Year but is not included in them.
In Panahi’s later films, the political resonance of his work is unmistakable. This is particularly the case in his third and fifth films, The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006), which cast light on restrictions faced by women under the Islamic Republic.3 Unlike his first two films, which centred on children, the latter faced a ban inside Iran. Yet the stark contrasts between The White Balloon and the later films in his oeuvre do not mean that his first work is bereft of social commentary or political implications. The final focus on the Afghan balloon seller is a poignant illustration of the hard-working yet excluded Afghan minority in Iran. Unlike other Iranian films about Afghans in Iran or Afghanistan, most notably those of the Makhmalbaf Production House, which often exoticise and are condescending to their subject, Panahi treats the Afghan boy with respect and humour.
While some have criticised the sentimental portrayal of children in 1990s Iranian cinema, contrasting them to the resilient children appearing in the films of the previous decade,4 the kids of The White Balloon cannot be dismissed as romanticised innocents. At his first appearance on screen, Ali is rushing out of the house to buy soap for his father, and is later yelled at for not paying attention and buying soap instead of shampoo. The film later suggests that Ali bears the brunt of his father’s physical anger as well. He is also the one sent to look for Razieh when she delays in returning from the fish store, and he acts as her protector when he finds her on the street. Razieh too is clever beyond her years and spends much of the film variously negotiating with adults. After attempting to barter with her mother in exchange for money for the fish, her mother confirms Razieh’s headstrong defiance when she responds with: ‘Not only have you put on your new clothes before the New Year, but you’ve also given your gifts away before getting them’. Finally, there is the Afghan balloon vendor, a working child who is not even able to celebrate the New Year. In short, the film’s children, all charming in their own ways, nonetheless reflect the social and economic difficulties that have contributed to their strong characters.
While the political resonance of Panahi’s later works have somewhat overshadowed his first film, The White Balloon remains a seminal work in both Panahi’s oeuvre and in Iranian cinema. It was one of the key works signalling the ascendancy of Iranian cinema in the 1990s, and remains remarkable in its own right as a well-told story with cleverly understated social commentary.
Niki Akhavan
Notes
1. For an overview of the state of Iranian cinema in the first decade after the 1979 revolution, see Hamid Naficy, ‘Iranian Cinema Under the Islamic Republic’, American Anthropologist, Vol. 97, No. 3, 1995, pp. 548–58.
2. For Panahi’s own comments on the neo-realism of his films, see Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar, ‘The Geography and History of Neo-realism’, in Saverio Giovacchini and Robert Sklar (eds), Global Neo-Realism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, Jackson, MS, University of Mississippi Press, 2012, p. 3. Hamid Naficy’s essay, ‘Neo-realism: Iranian Style’, included in the same collection, may also be of interest.
3. The depiction of the realities of women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran is not without its downsides in the international arena. For an example and critical intervention into how some celebrations of Panahi’s Circle have fed into troubling generalisations and erroneous assumptions about women and Iran by journalists and film reviewers, see Hossein Khosrowjah, ‘Neither a Victim nor a Crusading Heroine: Kiarostami’s Feminist Turn in 10’, Situations, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2011, pp. 53–65.
4. Azadeh Farahmand has argued that the children of 1980s Iranian cinema had a ‘strong and proud presence, fighting and surviving the injustices of their surroundings’ whereas the children of 1990s cinema were ‘purified prototypes’. See Azadeh Farahmand, ‘Perspectives on Recent (International Acclaim for) Iranian Cinema’, in Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2002, p. 105. Hamdi Reza Sadr’s essay, ‘Children in Contemporary Iranian Cinema: When we Were Children’, also included in this collection, is also relevant for its overview of children in Iranian cinema.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Iran. Production Company: Children’s Division of IRIB Channel 2 and Ferdos Films. Director: Jafar Panahi. Producer: Korush Mazkouri. Screenwriter: Abbas Kiarostami (based on an original idea by Parviz Shahbazi and Jafar Panahi). Cinematographer: Farzad Joudat. Sound engineers: Mojtaba Mortazavi and Saeed Ahmadi. Sound mixing: Mehdi Dejbodi. Editor: Jafar Panahi. Cast: Fereshteh Sadr Orafaiy (Mother), Ana Bourkowska (Elder Woman), Aida Mohammadkhani (Razieh), Mohsen Kafili (Ali), Mohammad Bakhtiari (Tailor), Mohammad Shahani (Soldier), Ali-Asghar Samadi (Afghan balloon vendor).]
Further Reading:
Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema: The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2012.
Sarah Niazi, ‘Urban Imagination and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi’, Wide Screen, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010.
Richard Tapper (ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity, London, I.B. Tauris, 2002.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.