One of the most brilliant movies you'll ever see! Before the 38-minute mark, you will be caught up in the drama of a lost little second grade school girl wandering along the perilous traffic of Teheran. After the 38-minute mark, one of the most incredible experiences in cinema begins: the meltdown of Mina the Diva. This tiny, squeaky voiced actress refuses to participate in the film anymore, and 4 minutes after her meltdown, director Panahi makes a split second decision that changed the film and his career: KEEP FILMING. The next hour is filled with more drama than any script could ever create: (a) Mina sheds her scarf, an arm cast and clothing before she storms off the bus in a rebellion as bold as a student uprising during the Revolution, (b) After yelling to the camera man to LAY OFF, Mina darts through traffic as the camera tries to keep up with her, but in her haste to flee the set, she keeps the mike on and we hear her footsteps and conversations she has with people as she tries to navigate her way home—she really does get lost, (c) we have scary scenes when we can't see Mina, but hear cars screeching to a halt: maybe she has she been hit (d) we hear some shady men talking to her, and we wonder is this a child threatened with abduction (e) on the bus and in taxi rides that Mina takes, we hear the true undercurrents of Iranian society regarding the tension between modern women and traditional men, (f) we learn of how compassionate some people can be towards keeping the world's most precious asset, our children, safe. I will not spoil it, but the natural ending to this tale is great. This is one of the best films you can all year. So AfroPixFlix says see it!

It starts with a little girl trying to get home from school by herself, and as in any story of this kind, there are all kind of funny events. It is always interesting to see the world of grown ups through the eyes of a kid, also the Ciné-Vérité style of the movie is amazing in catching the street universe of today's Tehran.

All this is true, but after five minutes you start asking yourself what's the big deal. As director Jafar Panahi is known to be one of the big names in the Iranian movie world you'd expect with each new film coming from him to see something really new. The Mirror came in 1997, two years after The White Balloon, another movie with kids: that one had been remarkable. Was The Mirror just an attempt to live on the account of the previous movie? Well, no. First of all, the universe is very different in the two movies. The White Balloon pictures a world in fair tale tones: it's from the girl point of view. In The Mirror the universe is also interacting with the girl reaction, but it's clearly the universe of Tehran street, as it is really. It's a delight: it's a poem dedicated to the chaos and trepidation of the street of a large Mid Eastern city, where modernity and specificity collide.

Actually both movies are in some way deceptive. The kid story hides a deeper level. It is made known in The White Balloon just at the end. Here in The Mirror this deeper level enters the center of stage in the mid of the story. It does it abruptly: the girl declares out of the blue that she doesn't want to play any more in the movie! She just wants to leave and go home truly by herself! The incident takes place in a crowded bus, and suddenly we notice that there are no passengers there, just the crew surrounded by equipment. Director Jafar Panahi is in the bus, sited near the cameraman, and he doesn't know what the hell to do. He decides to follow anyway the girl with candid camera. As one of the reviewers observed, that moment makes the movie a masterpiece! We had in the first half Ciné-Vérité, now we have simply Vérité.

They faint to forget taking the mike back from the girl, so the camera will follow her and the sound will be captured. Sometimes the camera looses the girl, while the sound continues to be heard. Some other times we see the girl, but the sound is missing. On her way home the girl encounters an old lady who played in the first part and now is complaining about the conditions of filming, about the director, etc. A man recognizes the girl as he has seen the shooting of a scene two weeks earlier: we have seen the same scene twenty minutes ago, in the first part. We meet then the man who recommended the girl for the film production. And so we are forced to realize that the first part was a movie, while this second part is no more. What is it then? Well, it is kind of movie, of course: in the same time a movie about its own making and a movie deconstructing itself.

Two questions arise here. Firstly, is the first part a movie, or just reality caught with (candid) camera? Because everything seems too natural to be a movie. And secondly, is the second part reality caught with candid camera, or just a movie telling a story about a girl and a candid camera? Frankly, we'll never know.

So, beyond the story of the little girl, funny and interesting, beyond the universe of Tehran streets, remarkably rendered, there is the hidden level: The Mirror is interested to study the relation between movie and reality. Panahi is interested here in the issue tackled by Kiarostami in almost all his movies! The tile comes from this hidden level: for Panahi a movie is a mirror of the reality. And the mirror works in both ways: for Panahi also the reality is a mirror of the movie.

To analyze this relation I am tempted to use the Niebuhr model (see H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture). It could sound blasphemous, but I think we can see in the relationship between art and reality the same types that H. Richard Niebuhr discovered in the relationship between Christian religion and culture.

I think the way Panahi sees the relationship between movie and reality is in terms of paradox: movie and reality are different; the movie remains a prisoner of the reality, regardless of any efforts to escape; the reality remains prisoner of the movie, though it's unaware. That the movie is the prisoner of the reality, that we can grasp. Why is the reality, in turn, the prisoner of the movie? I think for two reasons: because of the Big Brother presence (what else is a candid camera?), also because it is in the nature of reality the tendency to embellish itself.

So the two categories, movie and reality, are condemned to live together, though each one tries to run away. A tragedy defined by a paradox. It's the way Luther or Kierkegaard were seeing the relationship between a Christian living his faith and the universe surrounding him.

The fact that this film is set in Tehran makes it more then just a good little "slice of life" film. The setting and story give us a glimpse into ordinary life in one of the places that we westerners only read about in the newspapers and then only when bad things are happening there.

The story chronicles second grade student Mina's eventful trip home from school on a day that her mother fails to show up to take her home. Mina travels by scooter, bus, taxi and on foot through the frantic traffic of downtown Tehran. On her way home she meets with and overhears conversations by many different people from an old woman, to a police officer, to a auto mechanic. Mina also manages to quit the movie about half way through yet her odyssey continues anyway hence the film's title. Mina is very fresh and cute, the bit players are all very real and the trip home from school is fraught with situations that waiver between poignient to funny. Everything adds up to a film well worth watching.