Intentional
Jafar Panahi is clearly getting tired of speaking in code and is now just shouting from rooftops. Yes, guy!
It was Just an Accident
Director: Jafar Panahi • Writer: Jafar Panahi
Starring: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten
Iran / France • 1hr 43mins
Opens Hong Kong October 23 • IIA
Grade: A
Jafar Panahi is one of those filmmakers. A director from whom you know what to expect before you go in the cinema. He’s like Wes Anderson that way (guaranteed twee), or Martin Scorsese (guaranteed Catholic guilt-ridden gangsters), or Yorgos Lanthimos (guaranteed “Huh?”). In Panahi’s case it’s a guaranteed interrogation of state power and abuse, perception of reality and the fragility of memory, probably shot on the down low and ripe for banning. His latest Palme d’Or winner is It Was Just an Accident | یک تصادف ساده, a thriller as only Panahi could make one and a typically robust middle finger to the Iranian autocracy that keeps denying him “permission” to be an artist and regularly tries to throw him in jail. After something he did pissed off the powers that be in 2010 he was sentenced to six years in prison, detained in 2022 and released in 2023 – just in time to make it to Cannes and talk shit, in a sophisticated way, about Iran’s various forms of repression. Expect him to head back to the clink in 3… 2…
The brilliant and reflexive No Bears from 2022 is a hard act to follow but Panahi comes close on Accident, a terrifyingly vague but horrifically specific (and current in more places than just Iran) low key revenge thriller that looks like, well a low key revenge thriller on the surface, but scratch that surface and you get a barbed critique of courts, jailers unfair laws and a sensitive and sympathetic portrait of how normal people respond to injustice.
Those vans are trouble
Things kick off when a seemingly ordinary family man, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is driving home late one night and hits an animal, maybe, on a dark road. Theres’s some minor damage to the car so he rocks up to shop run by Azerbaijani auto mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) for repairs. Vahid hears Eghbal on the phone and is convinced the man is a prison guard where he was held for an unspecified crime and brutally tortured years before. The next day Vahid sets off to find a way to confirm what he heard – or what he thinks he heard – starting with photographer and fellow detainee Shiva (Mariam Afshari), who agrees, claiming to recognise his smell. Oh yeah, Vahid kidnapped the guy intending to bury him in the desert, but now he’s driving him around in a crate in the back of his van. Wouldn’t you know it, but Shiva’s clients at this moment happen to be a couple doing wedding photos, Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), and Goli too was brutalised in the same jail. She wants in on this payback. Lastly, the trio – Ali’s there but very, very reluctant to get freaky – goes looking for Shiva’s former flame Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), the bitterest of the bunch and perpetually on a short fuse. He confirms Eghbal’s idenity because he claims to recognise the feel of the man’s wonky leg. Over the course of a single day, the sextet will wrestle with their complicated pasts, each in their own way.
One of the things that makes Panahi’s films so great is his ability to dance around moral absolutes, no matter how cut-and-dried things seem, and to find the messiness of humanity in his stories. There is a right and wrong in It Was Just an Accident, but it’s not crystal clear, which is actually what gives the narrative its slowly ratcheting tension and much of its comedy if you can believe it. The cast is strong across the board, and everyone plays their cards close to the chest, making us – and them – ask on more than one occasion: Do they have the right guy? Would you tie someone to a tree and beat answers out of them as happens in the film’s gripping climactic sequence based on recalling the way someone smelled? The little details give Vahid and Shiva reason to demand a pound of flesh, but Panahi floasts just as many reasons to take the high road. It’s an incredible balancing act of empathetic messaging, and a chunk of classical entertainment to boot.