Your Company
 

Closed Curtain(پرده)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Iran · 2013
1h 46m
Director Kambuzia Partovi, Jafar Panahi
Starring Jafar Panahi, Hadi Saeedi, Maryam Moqadam, Azadeh Torabi
Genre Drama

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.

We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

75

RogerEbert.com by

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.

80

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.

91

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

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.

67

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.

88

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.

100

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

The journey is often challenging, but the rewards—heady, emotional, provocative and invigorating—are endless.

90

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.

70

The Dissolve by Scott Tobias

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.

Users who liked this film also liked