Bend it like Reza? In "Offside," girls aren't allowed in the stadium

"Offside," an entertaining new work from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, puts the audience in the same position as the characters. They are girls, desperate to get into a Tehran stadium to see their team's World Cup soccer qualifying match. Women, however, are prevented by law from attending live soccer games in Iran, and the girls try various tactics — disguises, bribes, running from guards — to get in. And throughout the movie, like the girls, we hear the tantalizing roar of the crowds but can't see the game other than a few fragmented peeks; it's kept from us, even as our desire to see the action increases.

As the game progresses, the girls (whose names we do not learn, nor are the other characters named) are rounded up and kept contained by guards: young men who seem more interested in watching the game themselves, or in taking phone calls from girlfriends. They're less angered than mildly amused by the girls' desperation to get in. One girl offers to take the guards' cattle to pasture if she can see the game; another, in disguise, sassily jokes with the guard who asks if she's a boy or a girl. ("What would you prefer?" she says.) Another, needing to go to the bathroom, causes momentary befuddlement for the guards; she's finally ushered into the men's room, her face concealed by a soccer poster.

As the long afternoon becomes night and the dry-hot light of the sun slowly fades, we learn a little more about the characters; particularly one girl (Sima Mobarak Shahi) who turns out to have a wistful reason, far beyond team fervor, for wanting to attend the game. Panahi's showing us the absurdity of the law (the film, he says, was partly inspired by his own daughter sneaking into a stadium to watch soccer with him), but he's doing so gently: "Offside" is more offbeat comedy than social-injustice drama. At its end, the girls mingle happily with the boys and men celebrating the game's result. As the nameless young women fade into a crowd, they become equal and indistinguishable, if only for a moment.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com