After seeing Offside, I searched the Internet for a definition for of the term in soccer. Some entries were vague, referring to such things as "an invisible line past which it is forbidden to go." There was one definition that was more specific, however, in a Salon.com article by Andrew O'Hehir on soccer and the World Cup. O'Hehir defines the "Offside Rule" as a rule in soccer that "prohibits an offensive player from running past the last defensive player until the moment the ball is passed forward." The reason for the rule is to prevent an offensive team from breaking though the defense en mas and bringing the ball to the goal without interference. However, defensive and offensive players are usually in close proximity and the exact moment that a ball is passed, relative to the positions of players, can be hard for a referee to determine.
This is pretty sophisticated stuff, and points to the remarkable ability of Jafar Panahi, Offside's director, to use casual scenes with non-professional actors to establish large metaphors. He does this beautifully. In Offside, the metaphor is one that relates several young women who separately disguise themselves as boys to get into a male-only championship Iranian soccer game to the situation of a player caught offside.
Like an offensive player who advances too aggressively, these women violate traditional assumptions about their position in society. At the same time, they continue to be participants in the national drama. One of them paints her face with the colors or the Iranian flag. None of them is entirely convincing as a man. They flirt, like real women, with the male guards who capture them. Their shared enthusiasm for Iran's team and for their country appears quite genuine (although such sentiments are always in doubt in works of artists in regimes that censor them).
As they are recognized as female and taken into custody, they girls are kept (by guards who are primarily concerned with staying out of trouble so as not to increase the length of their military service requirements) in improvised pens, put together outside the stadium and from which they can hear the roar of the crowd but not see the action. At one point, a guard who can see the progress of the game reports it to them. The guards are more rural and far less sophisticated than the smart, mouthy, urban women. All the same, the two connect. And they connect with us as well. Finding equivalent American roles is not that difficult.
Things end happily as Iran's team is victorious. The girls are herded into a spiffy government van to be taken to the Vice Squad. They expect that they will be reprimanded and released to their parents but they cannot be entirely certain. Not explicitly stated but hovering in the background are rape, torture, and lengthy imprisonment as real possibilities (has happened, know someone it happened to). Then the van driver and the soldiers on the van are pulled into the victory celebration. They abandon the vehicle and the girls take off. End of story.
For Americans, the best thing about Offside may be the way that it brings us into the everyday life of a strange and foreign place. And we discover that the place is not what we expected. People are strange and unpredictable like us.
This is pretty sophisticated stuff, and points to the remarkable ability of Jafar Panahi, Offside's director, to use casual scenes with non-professional actors to establish large metaphors. He does this beautifully. In Offside, the metaphor is one that relates several young women who separately disguise themselves as boys to get into a male-only championship Iranian soccer game to the situation of a player caught offside.
Like an offensive player who advances too aggressively, these women violate traditional assumptions about their position in society. At the same time, they continue to be participants in the national drama. One of them paints her face with the colors or the Iranian flag. None of them is entirely convincing as a man. They flirt, like real women, with the male guards who capture them. Their shared enthusiasm for Iran's team and for their country appears quite genuine (although such sentiments are always in doubt in works of artists in regimes that censor them).
As they are recognized as female and taken into custody, they girls are kept (by guards who are primarily concerned with staying out of trouble so as not to increase the length of their military service requirements) in improvised pens, put together outside the stadium and from which they can hear the roar of the crowd but not see the action. At one point, a guard who can see the progress of the game reports it to them. The guards are more rural and far less sophisticated than the smart, mouthy, urban women. All the same, the two connect. And they connect with us as well. Finding equivalent American roles is not that difficult.
Things end happily as Iran's team is victorious. The girls are herded into a spiffy government van to be taken to the Vice Squad. They expect that they will be reprimanded and released to their parents but they cannot be entirely certain. Not explicitly stated but hovering in the background are rape, torture, and lengthy imprisonment as real possibilities (has happened, know someone it happened to). Then the van driver and the soldiers on the van are pulled into the victory celebration. They abandon the vehicle and the girls take off. End of story.
For Americans, the best thing about Offside may be the way that it brings us into the everyday life of a strange and foreign place. And we discover that the place is not what we expected. People are strange and unpredictable like us.