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Iran · 2013
1h 46m
Director Kambuzia Partovi, Jafar Panahi
Starring Jafar Panahi, Hadi Saeedi, Maryam Moqadam, Azadeh Torabi
Genre Drama
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In this docufiction, a screenwriter and his dog live a reclusive life on the shores of the Caspian sea; Islamic law forbids owning dogs, and the writer hopes to get work done in peace. Their refuge is disrupted when a mysterious woman arrives at their door.
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If the dominant mood of "This Is Not a Film" was defiant, the main feeling here is melancholic. In implicitly confessing to suicidal impulses (as his mentor Abbas Kiarostami did in "Taste of Cherry"), Panahi shows how low his confinement has brought him.
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
On one level, the film (or nonfilm; it was shot on digital video and partly with smartphone cameras) is a mischievous, Pirandellian entertainment. It is also an allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement.
The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young
Closed Curtain is a moody, intellectually complex film that requires good will and brainwork on the part of the viewer to penetrate and enjoy.
In the struggle to tell a story, Panahi reveals the redemptive power of art. No longer issuing desperate pleas, he has turned to cinema for the sake of survival.
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Closed Curtain is a spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren’t about himself—which seems to be the point.
Less satisfying than his previous pic, yet still a bold, melancholy statement.
Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo
The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Possibly the Iranian new wave's last meta-man, Panahi is in an ideal position to make the unique methodology of his filmmaking merge with its substance. But he's always been fascinated by how a film's bell-jar bubble can be punctured, leaving a viscous interface between real and cinematic.
The two halves of Closed Curtain complement each other, but the first is more compelling than the second, partly because the mysteries of construction trump the grind of deconstruction, and partly because Panahi channeled his anguish more directly and affectingly with This Is Not A Film.
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