“I’m not that brave,” the Iranian director Jafar Panahi told Film Comment in an interview earlier this year. “I’m just doing my job. I’m making my films…. I feel a bit embarrassed when this is seen as courage.”
Such humility is becoming in any filmmaker, especially one clutching a Palme d’Or. The citation, bestowed at Cannes upon Panahi’s new film, It Was Just an Accident, gave the 65-year-old director a lifetime sweep of the world’s top film festival prizes, along with a Golden Bear from Berlin and a Lion from Venice. Panahi’s modesty serves as an extension of the humane sensibility that suffuses his films—an empathy that transcends simple technique. It also belies the obvious and lamentable fact that Panahi has had a very hard time doing his job for some while now.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution didn’t just transform the Iranian film industry. It rendered it a shadow of its former self, with directors forced to observe strict limitations on form and content in the name of religious purity. Panahi began working as an army cinematographer in the early 1980s, enrolling in film school after his military service and producing a series of television documentaries before shooting his beguiling, child’s-eye debut, The White Balloon, in 1995. He is a fluid, intuitive storyteller and a conscientious social critic; he has a gift for crafting deceptively conceptual story structures and for making the quotidian signify beyond itself.
Rather than submit to the dictates of Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance—where the buck stops for filmmakers in search of official support or theatrical distribution—Panahi has continually striven for creative freedom, whether via procedural ruses like submitting fake scripts for committee approval or else by ignoring the authorities’ input entirely. The extravagant praise bestowed on his films by international critics has, predictably, served to exacerbate his perceived enemy-of-the-state status at home; in 2010, following a series of increasingly public skirmishes with the authorities, Panahi was detained and imprisoned by the Iranian government on charges of disseminating propaganda against the regime. He was sentenced to six years in prison (a stretch eventually reduced to house arrest) and also a 20-year ban on travel, foreign media interviews, and filmmaking of any kind. The latter, it seemed, was a cruel and unusual punishment: an edict designed both to staunch a fearless artist’s output, and also to break his spirit.
It didn’t work—at all. Throughout the 2010s, Panahi conjured up a series of small, clandestinely shot films that dramatized, fictionalized, and allegorized his experiences, often with a wry sense of humor. The Magritte-inspired title of Panahi’s 2011 masterpiece This Is Not a Film, a ruefully funny video diary primarily shot on an iPhone in the director’s apartment, precisely annotated the nature of its maker’s resistance: It proclaimed that he was following the rules set down from on high even as he was breaking them, an act of cinematic sleight of hand in manacles, and with his fingers crossed slyly behind his back.
“Nothing can prevent me from making films since when being pushed to the ultimate corners I connect with my inner self,” said Panahi in 2015. “Despite all limitations, the necessity to create becomes even more of an urge.”
It Was Just an Accident is the work of a free man, but it feels more obsessive than liberated, as it plunges deeply into the minutiae and metaphysics of imprisonment.
That urgency can be felt throughout It Was Just an Accident, which is the first movie that Panahi has made on the other side of his filmmaking ban, as well as his first since being released from a seven-month stint in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in 2023. (He was jailed for inquiring about the status of a fellow anti-establishment director, Mohammad Rasoulof.) Technically, It Was Just an Accident is the work of a free man, but it feels more obsessive than liberated, as it plunges deeply into the minutiae and metaphysics of imprisonment. In formal terms, it might be Panahi’s most conventional piece of work since the 1990s, but accessibility shouldn’t be mistaken for compromise. It’s a bristling, brilliant piece of work: a swift and rollicking comic thriller whose autobiographical subtext lies under the surface, like an engine beneath a chassis, or a body stowed in the trunk.
Things begin innocuously enough. We open on a prosperous-looking family puttering their way back to the city down a country road at night, their car’s interior illuminated from within by the glow of a little girl’s iPad. The driver, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), is middle-aged and handsome, framed head-on through the car’s windshield, a camera setup nodding directly to Iranian art-film tradition (including Panahi’s own Taxi). Suddenly, there’s a bump in the road. Eghbal has driven over a dog. He doesn’t seem too broken up about it. “What will be will be,” sighs his wife. “God surely put it on our path for a reason.” “He killed a dog,” replies her daughter evenly from the back seat. “God has nothing to do with it.”
Like his wife—who, it turns out, is pregnant with their second child— Eghbal may be a true believer, but he isn’t given any opportunities of his own to opine about divine intervention. Rather, he’s swiftly reduced to a prop: drugged, battered dead weight, trussed-up and locked away in the back of a van driven by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), the film’s true protagonist. Vahid was working the late shift at a roadside warehouse when Eghbal brought in his wrecked car for repairs; watching from the shadows, Vahid recognized the interloper’s voice—and the squeaking of his prosthetic leg—as belonging to the notorious torturer at Evin known colloquially as “Peg Leg.” Vahid is a quiet man with no desire to revisit his past, but one accident begets another. What will be will be. The question: Did God put Peg Leg in Vahid’s path for a reason? Or does God have nothing to do with it?
There is one obvious precedent for Panahi’s scenario: Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s acclaimed play Death and the Maiden, in which an ex-political radical suffering PTSD reencounters—and then abducts—the Pinochet stooge who brutalized her behind closed doors. That play was adapted for the screen (very effectively) by Roman Polanski in 1994, but the movie that came to mind more for me during It Was Just an Accident—a good deal of which is set inside Vahid’s vehicle as it winds its way through town, taking on passengers at regular intervals—was Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, which stands at the very apex of the New Iranian Cinema. In Kiarostami’s film, a man named Mr. Badii drives around in search of a stranger who will agree to quietly bury him after he commits suicide; his peregrinations provide a microcosmic glimpse at the surrounding society. The same picaresque principle applies to Panahi’s film, but where the hitchhikers and bystanders in Taste of Cherry are reluctant to abet a religiously forbidden act of self-negation, Vahid’s fellow passengers—a bookseller, a bride-to-be, a wedding photographer, and a construction worker—are all ex-detainees like himself. They express a shared desire to dance on Peg Leg’s grave, which has already been dug in the middle of the desert, much like the one for Mr. Badii.
It is a thin line between parable-like simplicity and outright contrivance, and It Was Just an Accident circumnavigates its chosen route smartly; the slight bumpiness of the dramaturgy works in a story where the man at the wheel isn’t always sure where he’s headed. Panahi has written the script to have a sense of the absurd; at one point, a character name-checks Beckett, and there are various satirical threads woven through the storyline. Vahid pays off a pair of skeptical security guards via a portable card reader—a bit of business that gets repeated later on at a hospital. At least the bribery is convenient: no cash required. Throughout, Panahi cultivates a strain of mordant comedy around the problems of transporting a body through a busy city (this is surely the first Palme winner to evoke Weekend at Bernie’s). There’s also humor in the group’s sputtering, fractious interactions, but it’s rooted in authentic trauma. “He made me feel his rotten leg with a blindfold on, to prove his exploits in their fucking holy war,” moans Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), the construction worker, after examining the unconscious Eghbal’s body. “I’ve been running my hand over his leg for five years, in my nightmares.”
Hamid is ready to wring Eghbal’s neck where he lies and stands appalled by the idea of offering mercy to a man who destroyed so many lives. Others are more cautious, whether out of guilt, or doubt, or a sense of self-preservation. Shiva (Mariam Afshari), the wedding photographer, cannot be sure that the man in the van is Peg Leg. Like Vahid and Hamid, she never saw his face in prison. Moreover, she doesn’t know what should be done with him even in the case of a positive ID. Their captive is, after all, a husband and a father; when Eghbal’s cell phone inevitably rings, it’s his daughter—the little angel who mourned that poor dead dog—calling with news of an emergency that reroutes the movie’s plot (and the audience’s sympathies) while spiking the tension about whether or not the group has passed the point of no return.
There’s an element of gauntlet-dropping to Shiva’s character: Afshari is the first woman to appear in one of Panahi’s films without a mandatory hijab, and her vibe—thoughtful and cosmopolitan beneath a fashionable shank of silvering hair—makes her a complex avatar of social change, especially in a movie that maps the collateral damage of principled resistance. (In a nicely calibrated irony, Vahid’s van resembles those of the so-called morality police, whose remit is to enforce religious dress codes.) It’s Shiva who tries the hardest to pump the brakes on Vahid’s plan, and yet she also ends up delivering the film’s most harrowing speech, an outburst of pure fury that gives the impression of Panahi—who has necessarily had to play himself on-screen, for the last 15 years or so—addressing his captors through a distaff surrogate.
This penultimate sequence—lit expressionistically by deep-crimson brake lights and captured in a single, static, unblinking take—represents some of the most remarkable staging and direction of Panahi’s career; it sears through the screen, and lifts the veil, already thin and fluttering, on the film’s fiction. The coda, meanwhile, suggests a different kind of exposure, a gaping psychic wound that neither time nor distance will ever quite suture shut. The final moments find a key character paralyzed with fear and doubt, rooted to the spot as his past creeps up on him, one creaky footstep at a time. We’ll never know if he’s able to move on; the bravery of Panahi’s film lies in its maker’s own refusal to be overtaken. The movie is evidence of his mobility. He pushes forward, with his camera in hand: another job well done.
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