Who is that strange boy sitting quietly in the corner of a bus full of screaming fans going to the football match? In fact, this shy boy is a girl in disguise. She is not alone; women also love football in Iran. Before the game begins, she is arrested at the checkpoint and put into a holding pen by the stadium with a band of other women all dressed up as men. They will be handed over to the vice squad after the match. But before this, they will be tortured -- they must endure every cheer, every shout of a game they cannot see. Worse yet, they must listen to the play-by-play account of a soldier who knows nothing about football. Yet, these young girls just won’t give up. They use every trick in the book to see the match.
Jafar Panahi’s films are often described as Iranian neo-realism. Although all of his films, including Offside, have been banned by Iran, he continues to make movies which explore the very human side of the conflicts in his native country. In the case of Offside, he used a fake name and false papers in order to get permission to shoot at an actual soccer match in Iran. As a result, Offside has a documentary feel which captures the very real humor and determination of the Iranian women – and men – who love soccer and are willing to go to extreme lengths for the opportunity to cheer on the home team. The DVD includes an interview with Panahi.
Lighter in tone but still a companion piece to his devastating 2000 film The Circle, the superb Offside finds director Jafar Panahi continuing his exploration of the difficulties of a woman's place in contemporary Iran. The ingenious concept of Offside puts most of the action at a large soccer stadium in Tehran, where a group of young women--banned from the game on the sole basis of their sex--have been captured by stadium guards after sneaking inside. Not only are they in a kind of holding pen awaiting arrest, the girls can't even glimpse the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, although they can hear the sounds of the crowd. (They've made themselves up to look like boys, thus risking serious consequences for the sake of their fandom, but the no-women-allowed rule is in place to "protect" them from the rough habits of men.) Panahi actually withholds the game itself, focusing on the interactions between the girls and their guards--a group of disaffected guys who would rather be watching the game themselves. At every turn Panahi illuminates some subtle point about the limits put on women, yet the film is full of humor. The viewer is left not with a political tract but with rich human comedy, and with the idea that the spectacle of a white ball pushed across a green field might bring people together in a way that transcends sex, class, or the oppressive rules of a regime. --Robert Horton
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