Like many Iranian movies that travel the international festival circuit and secure a U.S. release, Jafar Panahi's Offside protests the second-class status of women in that country, making a strong, eloquent plea for equality and liberation. Unlike most such films, however, this one isn't a solemn, well-intentioned drag — though it does involve drag. Banned from attending public sporting events, allegedly to prevent their delicate ears from being exposed to profanity, female soccer fans routinely disguise themselves as men and sneak into the stadium. Offside, which Panahi filmed on location at an actual World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain in the summer of 2005, chronicles the misadventures of half a dozen such infiltrators, ranging from the meekly terrified to the defiantly butch, who get nabbed by security and wind up in an improvised holding pen just outside the gates, guarded by bumpkin soldiers who are themselves far more interested in the game than in gender politics.
Lighter and more loose-limbed than Panahi's The Circle (2000), a blunt instrument widely and erroneously praised for its portrait of Iranian women as perpetual victims, Offside, more than any other Iranian film I've seen, seems to capture the fundamental(ist) truth about everyday oppression. What's striking isn't so much the womens' desperate yet comical ruse as the mens' placid, quizzical response: on a bus traveling to the match, guys admiringly point out the impostors to their buddies ("these girls know all the tricks"), while the soldiers charged with flushing them out at the stadium wear the sheepish, apologetic expression of those who know they're on the wrong side of history. (I saw the same embarrassed look on the faces of cops who busted an underground NYC poker club I used to play at.) Best of all is the unexpectedly rousing finale, which practically transforms the film into Jafar Panahi's Block Party. Sexism may still be well entrenched in Iran, but it shrivels to insignificance amidst the euphoria of nationalism.
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Mike D'Angelo