I didn't intend to watch a movie about female soccer fans in Iran who are so crazed, they will risk imprisonment or execution in order to get in to "the big game," on the same day that I woke up before 5 a.m. to watch my Boston Red Sox get eliminated from the 2017 baseball playoffs.But one did inform the other, in a way. Because of my early rising time, I needed something really short if I were to watch a movie last night. Offside, Jafar Panahi's 2006 film, was the shortest in the collection of library movies in my possession, at just 88 minutes. Even so, I was tired enough that I took about five short naps during it.
Fortunately, my regular need to pause was a reflection only of my exhaustion, and the fact that I was reclined on the couch way too close to parallel with the cushions to have any hope of staying awake. I was quite captivated by the film, and it was perfectly timed in many respects.
First, some explanation of that early awakening.
I live in Australia, which, as you know, has a very different time zone than North America. This often means that the sports I want to watch are on at terrible times. Coming on in the middle of my workday is bad enough, but it can be even worse when it's an afternoon game, and the damn thing starts at 4 in the morning. Because Major League Baseball didn't consider the Boston Red Sox and the Houston Astros much of a draw -- not the draw it considered the Cleveland Indians and the New York Yankees, anyway -- all four of the games in that opening series were played in the afternoon, with the earliest coming at just 1 p.m. Eastern on Monday. That was 4 a.m. my time on Tuesday.
I wouldn't have considered waking up at all, except that the Sox showed some unlikely mettle by blowing out the Astros in Game 3 to stave off elimination, after getting blown out themselves in Games 1 and 2. It's only a five-game series, so one more win and suddenly the thing would go to a decisive Game 5. And the 4 a.m. start time might have its advantages, in the following respect: It might cut into my beauty sleep, but it might also finish entirely before I even left for work. In a way, this was actually my best opportunity to watch an entire game.
I left it to my body clock, which has been waking me up at strange hours in recent weeks for much less important reasons than a playoff baseball game. And though it didn't get me up for start time, I was awake not long after 4:30. At which point I saw my first innings of Boston Red Sox baseball in 2017. Hey, there's a trickle down effect to those inconvenient start times, and this year, I hadn't managed to get in a single bit of live game action.
Unlike the other games in the series, this one was close throughout. (Game 3 was close for seven innings before becoming a blowout.) I missed the Sox' first run, but they were down only 2-1 when I decided to get in another hour's sleep from 6 to 7, a decision prompted by the prediction that the game was about to be halted by inclement weather. Apparently, it was never halted. By the time I woke the Sox had taken a lead, 3-2.
By the time I left for work, they were down 4-3, and that eventually became 5-3 before they gave their fans a last gaps of hope with a leadoff homer in the ninth. But they ultimately fell short by a 5-4 final score. They scored on three separate occasions, none of which I saw, and I ended up catching a total of about four innings. This being the total number of innings I watched my favorite sports team all year.
Clearly I wasn't as invested in the Red Sox this year, in part because my favorite player (David Ortiz) retired last year, and in part because as a Boston sports fan, I've had it too good for too long. Since everything turned around for Boston sports teams in February of 2002 when the New England Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, there have been four more championships for the Patriots, three championships for the Red Sox, and one each for the Celtics and Bruins, if I cared about hockey. At this point I don't have the right to be disappointed about any of my teams not winning a championship, and it's not much of a step beyond that to just disengage. I wouldn't say I'm fully disengaged from the Red Sox, but during the baseball season I get much more involved in my fantasy team -- even though it too has experienced the thrill of a championship in 2010 and 2013.
Offside reminded me what it's like to be hungry for victory.
And I'm going to spoil this movie, because it's 11 years old and I don't flatter myself that my writing about it is going to make you run out and see it. Though you really should.
Continuing a proud tradition that I suppose you could call Iranian neo-realism (perhaps some people do call it that), Jafar Panahi -- you know, the guy who has been placed under house arrest by his government and can't make movies for 20 years -- filmed his last movie before the government descended upon him about the Iranian soccer team's attempt to qualify for the World Cup in 2006. Of course, it's not really about that quest per se. It's about the attempt of a handful of young women to view that quest.
See, in Iran, the government does not allow women to enter a football stadium -- the rest of the world calls it football, remember -- for fear that they will become sexually aroused by seeing men in shorts. Or something like that. Anyway, the punishment for even attempting to enter the stadium is severe. The movie never completely reveals what is expected to happen to these young women, but one who dressed up as a soldier to try to gain entry is told she would have been executed if she had come in an officer's outfit. Yikes.
But some women do try to get in anyway, or at least, some did in this movie -- about seven or eight that we see. We follow one girl on a bus of male revelers before the game, looking nervous as hell as she has stuffed her hair inside a hat and painted her face, in the hopes of coming across as male. And because this is as close as you can get to real life, and not some Hollywood movie, the ruse is completely unconvincing. Everyone she comes in contact with sniffs her out in an instant, and in the case of those that don't, you have to figure they just can't be bothered and are going to let her try to get away with it.
She doesn't. Not even close. She successfully buys a ticket from a scalper -- at a heavily marked up price, to cover his risk for making the sale -- but she completely loses her composure when a guard at the gate motions to pat her down prior to entry. She doesn't even sniff the seating area, being escorted directly to a makeshift detention area outside one of the gates, that might have been mistaken for a smoking section. A half-dozen girls are already being kept there, and more join as the narrative progresses.
In a Hollywood movie, our protagonist would find a way to sneak away from the guards, or perhaps receive the help of a sympathetic guard, but in Iran, they're as much at risk of punishment for aiding and abetting as she is for trying to break the law. One girl does escape when she concocts a story about needing to use the bathroom -- the guard escorting makes her wear a poster over her face so others don't see her gender -- but we don't follow her into the stadium. She reports back later on, presumably having gotten in at least some of the action. But our protagonist? She never gets closer than a guard having pity on her by offering her a brief bit of secondhand play-by-play commentary.
As you keep watching Offisde, you figure that something has to break their way and these girls get to see at least a couple plays of Iran's match with Bahrain. But it never comes to pass. Instead "the chief" finally appears and directs them down to a waiting bus, where they are going to be taken elsewhere to have whatever punishment is waiting for them meted out to them.
In that bus, the closest they get to experiencing the game finally transpires, when one of the guys who has been guarding them the whole movie takes pity on them and fixes the broken antenna well enough to get the game on the radio. You sense this is as much out of self-interest as it is an actual favor to the prisoners. But the upshot is that they get to listen to about the final five minutes of action -- something they could have done at home, of course. At home, they could have even watched it on TV.
And they hear Iran wrap up a 1-0 victory that helps them qualify for the World Cup. A victory that really happened, fortunately, as Panahi was filming in and around the actual match, in the guerrilla style for which he has since become famous. Though I suppose, given his methods and his commitment to harsh realism, Panahi would have been able to turn either a win or a loss into compelling drama.
I'm happy it was a win, because my God does bedlam ensue. Whatever fates may await them, these girls go crazy, lost in the sheer exhilaration of victory -- a victory not even really comparable to winning the championship, except that when you love the game and you love your team, even a lesser victory is the occasion for intense exultation.
Panahi captures the celebrations not only inside the bus, but outside of it, catching the passing cars honking, the people hanging out their windows holding up Iranian flags, through the bus windows. Then the bus stops, the guards as overcome as the prisoners, none of them fearing the repercussions that may await them, as everyone pours out and joins the pandemonium in the streets. Oh, and did I mention that contraband fireworks are whizzing everywhere, both inside and outside the bus?
The film's final shot is a return to our protagonist, focus on whom has drifted from time to time during the narrative, as she becomes enveloped by the crowd, a sparkler in each hand.
They might have watched this game at home, but if so, they mightn't have experienced a moment of community, a loss of inhibition, a surge of pure happiness quite like this.
That's what sports can do. And that's how I want to feel about sports again. So if my teams need to go another ten years without a championship, just to give me that feeling again, then so be it.
When you consider imprisonment as a consequence of trying to see your favorite team compete, losing three hours of sleep doesn't seem like much at all.
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