Offside

Jafar Panahi’s Offside (2006) is one of the great football movies, and yet it hardly depicts any football. Set in Tehran, during a World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain, it begins by following one nameless girl’s (Sima Mobarak-Shahi) failed attempt to enter the male-only stadium where the event is being held. The guards immediately recognise that she’s a woman and detain her in a holding area at the stadium’s margins along with six other girls who had also disguised themselves as men hoping to bypass security. The girls are kept just a few steps from a direct view of the field but are condemned to staring at a thick wall of concrete, an iron curtain. Senselessly deprived of a view of the match by their captors, they keep track of the game instead through sound—the crowd’s waves of chanting, the rat-a-tat of radio commentarists—and become seized by the electricity in the air.

Panahi’s act of withholding is strategic: it amplifies the senselessness and cruelty of the women’s punishment and reminds us that power often works in ridiculous ways. But it also shifts the focus away from the game and onto the female fans, who, in the face of arrest and persecution, persist in their devotion. They may perceive themselves as ordinary football fanatics, their actions born of sports obsession; but they’re also, perhaps inadvertently, pushing back against the patriarchy by exposing its contradictions. If love for one’s country—one’s team—is expected, why ostracise half of its followers? The soldiers themselves seem only half-convinced of the logic behind the regime’s ban on women.

Up until 2019, when FIFA threatened to suspend Iran from the 2022 World Cup in response, Iranian women had been completely forbidden from watching live football matches—a policy that had been in place since the 1979 Islamic revolution. (Today, the number of female spectators allowed to attend a match is still heavily restricted, and those with tickets are seated in segregated areas.) Offside, the final feature Panahi made before his arrest in 2010, was inspired by his own daughter’s struggles to attend a game. He was able to secure access to Tehran’s state-run Azadi stadium by submitting a phoney script involving male football fans, but the real project would be a docufictional drama performed and improvised by nonprofessional actors. Shot on the ground during much of the real Iran vs. Bahrain match from 2006, the film approximates the length of the game, using its highs and lows—its goals and the pause at halftime—to structure its story and build out its web of characters.

Mobarak-Shahi’s woman-in-drag is conspicuously reserved on a bus ride to the game among a gaggle of boisterous lads; a quivering bunch of nerves when she realises she looks nothing like a man. Each of the other girls are different. One simply can’t stop crying, and another is a mouthy punk with a heartbreaker’s swagger and a cigarette always dangling from her mouth. Another girl is caught wearing a soldier’s uniform and is thrown into the holding cell halfway through the film. Her naturally androgynous look might’ve helped her get away with it, but she flew too close to the sun when she plopped down in the VIP suite to watch the game.

Contrary to what one might expect, the young soldiers aren’t ragingly villainous misogynists, though they are weak, fearful and more than happy to benefit from the country’s codified sexism. They worry about losing their jobs or receiving punishment from their superiors should they fail to put the girls in their place, an anxiety that often takes humorous swerves as they contend with the women’s daring—such as when one of the soldiers creates an absurd mask for a prisoner so as to prevent her from being looked at when she enters the stadium to use the bathroom. A father is genuinely outraged when he finds his daughter in the holding cell however, reminding us that for an older and more traditional generation, the moral stakes of exposing women to male spaces are weighty and real.

But Offside is ultimately a young person’s symposium, one that treats football like rock and roll when it was “sinful,” asking: how much are we willing to risk to pursue our desires; to claim our lives for ourselves? Like a Persian riff on The Breakfast Club, which is to say detention looks more like jail, Panahi’s masterwork ends on a note of hope. Iran wins the game and, briefly, the boundaries between man and woman collapse as the jolly crew of prisoners and the quietly sympathetic soldiers spill out from the van that’s on its way to the police station, and disappear into the masses partying on the street, everyone the same in their joy.